I'm a fan.
Started with Bobby Allison in the Coca-Cola #12
Recently Bobby Labonte.
I go to Pocono at least once a year.
Hitting a wall at 190mph is far from minor...
OT- Today's Anniversary. Dale Earnhardt Sr.
- Thread starter WhiteBus
- Start date
I'm a fan.
Started with Bobby Allison in the Coca-Cola #12
Recently Bobby Labonte.
I go to Pocono at least once a year.
Hitting a wall at 190mph is far from minor...
Happens all the time. Guys walk away from much worse. Maybe you're distracted from rating threads when you go because you don't know a thing about it.
I forgot more than you'll ever know
Just because someone walks away doesn't make it minor.
+1 - and the stupid chase points format blows, especially the eliminator crap.
You really need to just stop. Guys don't "walk away from much worse". The guy is dead. By definition, that's as "worse" as it gets. Your preconception of the severity of an accident is based entirely on how much metal you see flying around, and that's both stupid and irrelevant.
According to this site, the speed was estimated to be between 157 and 161. The section I linked also talks a bit about the forces involved, the heading angle, etc.
Everything is relative. A crash at 15mph can be non-minor. The circumstances matter, obviously.
There are many high speed crashes of all kinds in motor racing. Hell, a F1 car's normal braking into a hairpin corner at the end of a straight is a bit like a controlled crash in terms of the G forces involved. There's nothing minor about the effects on the body even in that scenario.
However, relatively speaking, Earnhardt's crash appeared to be minor relative to many other NASCAR crashes. And others have survived similar crashes. It wasn't minor - someone died. But that doesn't mean that it didn't seem that way at first.
There's a silly assumption going on in this thread that somehow there's some kind of universal truth about how something looks. Perception is kind of down to the person doing the perceiving. How a thing looks to one person and how it looks to another do not have to be the same.
If he was strapped in like he was supposed to he'd be alive. It was easily a survival crash as are 99.9999999% of NASCAR crashes. This wasn't a personal car nor was it Main Street
Interested to see how Tony Stewart's guy will do tomorrow night in the Truck race - supposedly he is quite a wheel man for being only 4' 4'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rico_Abreu
& don't forget the Twin 125's are on tonight - FS1 i think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rico_Abreu
& don't forget the Twin 125's are on tonight - FS1 i think.
Was going to joke that he probably came up through the midget series, turns out he did.
if you get a chance to visit what they did here at Daytona is unreal. $400 million and 1 year and the stands are now like a nice football stadium. Real nice.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
The independent investigation conducted by Dr. Barry Myers concluded that Earnhardt's death was caused by an unrestrained head and neck and that the mechanism of injury was entirely exclusive of either the installation or orientation (use) of the safety harnesses.
The only thing that would have potentially saved Earnhardt in that crash was the use of a HANS device, and even that was inconclusive. At the time of the accident there was no policy in place that either mandated or encouraged the use of HANS devices and virtually none of the drivers used them.
It was specifically because of the lack of conclusive evidence with regard to mechanism of injury and crash forces that NASCAR mandated the installation of "black boxes" in all cars, so that more baseline data on impact energy could be collected.
Yes, they do have Ferrari engines as well as other Ferrari components.
It will be interesting to see where they land competitively. I think Romain Grosjean, their lead driver, is extremely talented and given a good enough car, can win races for them. It would be great if Haas can be competitive with Williams in their first season. I kind of doubt it.
This season will be have many interesting story lines. Haas's arrival in the sport is one. Renault joining as a constructor instead of just an engine supplier is another. Seeing if the storied McLaren/Honda partnership can, in it's second season of being reunited, become competitive is a third.
I believe that Mercedes will probably dominate once again for 2016. If we're lucky, Ferrari will have closed the gap to Mercedes even more. And despite the relative weakness of the Renault engine, Red Bull can never be completely counted out. They were definitely closing the gap towards the end of 2015.
2017 may be all kinds of different, with the formula spec being modified substantially to improve the lap times. Can't wait.
I've never been a big F1 fan, but have always been interested in the allegations that it's basically Bernie Ecclestone's Road Show and that the race outcomes are predetermined. What's your opinion on that?
There's little doubt it's the Bernie Eccelestone road show. He's the money man with all the influence that position wields (which is quite a bit in F1). However, he doesn't get everything he wants. A recent example being how he was pretty vehemently opposed to the switch from V8s to Turbo-V6s. The V8s would put more money in Bernie's pocket. He fell in line, but after the switch, has been pretty vocally pissed off about it.
I can't see how it would be possible to predetermine race outcomes. It would be like predetermining the winner of the super-bowl. It's theoretically possible. But too many people would have to be in on the conspiracy to ensure that the outcome is what is desired. The F1 media would have found and reported on it long ago.
Finally, Ferrari are able to dictate an awful lot of things to F1. If Ecclestone or anybody else were to be able to predetermine races, it would be Ferrari winning or nobody. And that hasn't happened for a long time.
There was a story about NASCAR a number of years ago that ran in one of the car mags. It purported to tell the story of "The Call", whereby a particular team would be informed that they would be allowed to use a more open restrictor plate for an upcoming race and that the NASCAR judges would look the other way.
It was an allegation, of course, albeit one that came from a NASCAR "insider". And it never really got any pub beyond Road & Track or Car & Driver or whatever magazine it ran in.
I agree that it would be virtually impossible to surreptitiously create an environment that outright assured or determined a winner. But the NASCAR allegations, true or not, did demonstrate that you could create an environment that provided a specific competitive advantage.
As in the NASCAR rumor, it might be possible to pay Charlie Whiting (the FIA guy responsible for inspections, among other stuff) and a few of his people off to look the other way while one team cheated. Wouldn't be easy and would be very risky. You'd obviously also have to have a handful of engineers on the cheating team in on things.
That wouldn't ensure any single race result, though, because race cars break down. And any advantage would have to be pretty subtle. Formula One measures everything and data is king. And because of the huge finances involved, there are more than the typical number of engineering super-geniuses wandering around in the F1 paddock looking to see what makes their competitors cars tick.
But over the course of a full season, it might be enough to give the slightly advantaged team enough of a leg up to greatly influence their standings in the championship.
What can happen, though, is that the powers that be in F1 (Ecclestone, Ferrari and the FIA) could collude to make or prohibit rules changes that are advantageous or disadvantageous to a particular team. An example of this would how F1 switched from an aero-differentiated formula to an engine-differentiated formula which effectively ended Red Bull's (who have Adrian Newey, aero-super-genius) four year domination and propelled Mercedes to the top. I think the interruption of Red Bull's winning ways was probably planned. I think the ascension of Mercedes was probably not planned.
He became a good bit more consistent before Lotus lost their financing. He's a very good driver. Probably one of the top 5, IMO.
Happened to catch the movie Grand Prix '66 the other night - pretty good movie especially the racing scenes. Many famous drivers in the movie - think the whole movie is on Youtube.
Insane how fast those guys where going with minimal safety gear and fans literally standing on the side of the track with cars going by 180 mph.
Insane how fast those guys where going with minimal safety gear and fans literally standing on the side of the track with cars going by 180 mph.
No, the timing of that race is typically bad for me. I would like to go every year. Have you been?
No....been holding off until my kids were old enough to go. I'm not evenly slightly interested in car races but my wife's family is all in. They are Italian immigrants who settled in Montreal and treat F1 races like they are the Super Bowl. First time I visited her family we literally sat on the couch while the food got cold as if the result had massive implications. I got up to go to the table and my future FIL looked at me like he was going to kill me if I moved another inch. Heck, he died ten years ago about 2 minutes after the F1 race ended. He was quite sick and I can't believe he was listening but it was on the hospital TV and his last breath didn't happen until the race ended. My BIL is a big Ferrari guy(has owned 3) so he gets passes to all the VIP events, dinners, etc. anyone I've ever spoken to says it's an event like no other. Figure in a year or two we will try it out.
Tough sport to adopt as a fan. I never followed nascar other than occasionally flipping thru channels on weekends as a kid. Went to the 600 in CLT as an adult. Was sooooo boring. The most exciting part was the "start your engines"! After that it was just loud and long. Hard to follow in person if you're not a regular fan.
Sounds like a family I'd get along with. I used to stay up or wake up at all hours of the night to watch live broadcasts of F1 practice, qualifying and the race from Japan, or Singapore, or Australia, etc. Is what eventually prompted me to get DVR service.
To be honest, for actually watching the race, I prefer TV coverage because it's a lot easier to understand everything that's going on. At the track, it's more about the atmosphere and the sound (which is no longer so great) and the sights. Plus some of the locations look amazing. Monaco being the classic example, but most of the locations are pretty awesome.
Having the sort of access your BIL has would make it that much better. Part of my dream vacation of traveling to all the races for a whole F1 season would be doing it with paddock passes everywhere. Last time I checked, for Montreal, I think they were about $5000 per pass w/a 2 ticket minimum. If I'm going to do a full 20 race season of that, and take my two boys along, it might be cheaper to just buy a Ferrari to get free passes. My daughter will want to travel with us too, but she has no interest in attending races - so I got that going for me, at least.
Oh well, I better get back to work if I'm going to make this dream a reality.
Similar threads
