Katherine Legge’s 180 mph crash during the later stages of yesterday’s Champ Car race at Road America was one of the most violent looking accidents I have ever witnessed. But in many ways that was a good thing. The visual ferocity of the images we saw on TV was in fact a testament to the safety of a modern race car that is designed to shed and dissipate energy away from the car. The shunts with little apparent damage to the car are invariably worse than the spectacular ones. A few years ago it would have been inconceivable that someone could walk away from an impact like we saw yesterday, the fact that Katherine Legge was able to calmly walk out of the medical center and wave to the crowd and conduct interviews afterwards was a massive relief all around. While we know the cars are safer than they have ever been we still can’t afford to take that safety for granted.

(Just as a side thought – just imagine how much press and TV coverage that crash would have got if it had been Danica Patrick in the car??)

While the race was overshadowed by the crash, it was a solid result for A.J. Allmendinger over a seemingly petulant champion-elect Sebastian Bourdais, who judging from a few post-race comments needs to learn the meaning of the phrase “that’s motor-racing.”

This entry was posted on Monday, September 25th, 2006 at 11:06 pm and is filed under ChampCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.