So on Monday night (US time) the race was finally run; Monday Night Football at 200 miles per hour was how one of the commentators described it. There was plenty of action on and off the track, but no-one was prepared for this:
Quite what went wrong with Juan Pablo Montoya's car is yet to be determined, but he spun sideways into one of the mobile jet units used to dry the track during caution periods. The result was a spectacular inferno as 200 gallons of jet fuel went up in flames, and Montoya's car was totalled.
The best news of all though; neither Montoya nor the driver of the jet dryer were seriously injured in a spectacular incident that will surely featured one day on Destroyed in Seconds!
The best news of all though; neither Montoya nor the driver of the jet dryer were seriously injured in a spectacular incident that will surely featured one day on Destroyed in Seconds!
9 comments:
That has to be the most bizarre accident I've ever seen in motorsport. F1 can be a drudge to sit through sometimes but NASCAR is awful.
The most bizarre accident I've ever seen in motorsport.
Gotta say the safety standards they have in oval racing in the USA defies all common sense. First the Wheldon tragedy and now this. Having a vehicle towing a jet engine around a race track thats carrying some sort of aviation fuel that is potentially highly inflammable while allowing race cars to pass it at high speed is nothing short of completely brainless.
In defence of NASCAR Lindsay, the jet dryers are only on the track when the caution lights are on. Montoya exited the pits, and was trying to catch up with the tail of the field, which would have been proceeding at low speed behind the pace car. Giving Montoya the benefit of the doubt, something broke in the susepnsion department of his car; then again, Montoya is no stranger to controversial accidents, and most drivers in NASCAR have a Montoya tale to tell!
No need to defend Nascar KS, the 250,000 fans at Daytona can do that for themselves.
That was a strange one though!
Quite so MVL; with the race postponed to Monday night, I guess there will have been a degree of absenteeism below the Mason-Dixon Line; there certainly didn't seem to be too many fans not returning for the Monday night race.
I take your points IV2 but NASCAR need to look at their safety rules, for example in F1 the FIA has stipulated that when the safety car because of a full course yellow is on the track cars at the back of field are not allowed to speed around the circuit to catch up the main pack of vehicles if there is a gap as there is a speed limit which is rigidly enforced.
It seems that Montoya's car suffered some sort of significant failure but it was surely commonsense for him to have eased up a bit while passing a service vehicle especially when driving a vehicle that he thought may have had a problem.
All motorsport is dangerous. I'd say the safety measures are more than adequate. The fact that Montoya and the truck driver walked away more than proves that.
Strange race though, with US$200,000 for leading at the halfway mark.
Great smashes as well with Montoya's being a beauty.
Something definitely broke, you could see the sparks but bloody bad luck for the truck driver - all that open fence area and Montoya had to choose his bit.
You're not wrong there Tinman. That hit that Jimmie Johnson took at the start of lap two was HUGE; t-boned at almost 200mph. But it's a testament to the strength of the cars, the full-containment seats and the HANS devices that the drivers have to wear that Johnson was talking to the media 15 minutes after a massive collision.
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