Oh no, what a terrible tragedy!

On a race day, if I'm outside I can faintly hear the sound of the cars' engines from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, as the sound carries a long distance, and I remember hearing all about Dan Wheldon on the news back in May.

Yes, the Condor's sport is a dangerous one.

Always sad news to hear.

It's strange, I'd have thought that Indy would have had more deaths than NASCAR, because of the style of car, but NASCAR as three times as many.

If we add Indy, CART, and F1 then they just barely inch ahead.

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Perspective Alters Reality

The engineers have designed very safe race cars and many of their designs make it into regular cars. The good news is that the other 14 drivers involved survived the crash.

I'd often wondered why Anderson would allow Jason to race, considering how dangerous it is. Actually, Rally Racing is even more dangerous - I recently watched a show about it and was horrified by the number of Rally drivers missing limbs.

What if Jason was severely injured in a race? It would affect G-Force.

But the real world outweighs these speculations.

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I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers so far...

Death is never good. At least he went doing what he wanted to do.

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Health and Happiness

Wheldon's death was one of the saddest moments I can remember as an IndyCar fan. I'm too young to remember the 1964 accident at the start of the 500, I was only 16 months old, but there have been other deaths in the sport that have been heartbreaking. We lost a great one on Sunday and his passing leaves an emptiness in a lot of hearts. Drivers know the risks but they still have a need to do what they do that few people can understand. Lessons will be learned from this and the cars made even safer. That will be Dan's legacy.

Sorry I just got into this topic. Was off-line yesterday. lb, I know what you mean about living so close to the track you can hear the cars. We used to be able to hear the PA from our condo when the cars were on the other end of the track. We could walk to the track from our condo. Kind of miss that.

'73 was just aweful. I remember it way too well. In fact we were just talking about it on Friday. That wreck in '95 was very scary. I was impressed he survived that one at all. The biggest irony of it was that several years later, Stan died in a traffic accident.

The first race I have any memory of was 1968, but the first one I have clear memories of is 1972. Both of those were fairly safe.

The worst crashes I ever actually saw were pretty much all practice or qualifying. There were several in races I was at, but none were that serious except in 1987 when the wheel flew up in the stands. I think that happened again in the '90s, I just don't remember which year.

IndyCar racing is definitely a sport where you have to have respect for the machines involved. Anything can happen at any time and no one can get too complacent. Certainly not the drivers, and not even the fans for that matter. One good thing about Sunday was that there were no grandstands at that point along the track or things could have been a whole lot worse.

Our seats are close enough to the fence and the outside of turn 4 that accidents happen in front of us every year. We have to stay vigilante. I'm sure there wil be some ceremony at Indy in 2012 for Dan.

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I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers so far...