7 replies to this topic

[LarryKing]

http://www.your4stat...gt0W3CDbMCgcDbA

 

[Jim Drago]

Thoughts and prayers to his family.

[Glenn Davis]

Thoughts are with his family...

 

I don't want to take anything away from the seriousness of a death, but this Hyperfest was notable for incidents.

 

Saturday was a bad day indeed.  I race SSM in Lightning, the race mentioned at the bottom of the article.  I got the checkers and pulled it out of gear for a long coast down the straight.  About halfway down, the tub at T1 went Red.  We sat for quite awhile before they turned us around and we backtracked to the pits.

 

If you're familiar with SP Main, T9 is the right-hander that heads up toward the bridge.  On the last lap, 2 PTD cars got together halfway up the hill and both were crushed.  The worse of the two ended up over the tires and into the woods at the right bridge abutment.  They flew the driver out; he had some broken bones and other injuries.  Looking at the site yesterday evening, there were broken trees; it must have been a tremendous impact.  I'm hoping he recovers fully.

 

The death actually occurred on Jefferson Circuit.  At Hyperfest, they do something called "Hyperdrives", where they advertise "you get to drive your car on the track".  This is not HPDE, but for $50 anybody can sign up and do some laps with an instructor.  I don't know exactly where on Jefferson it occurred, but the car went sideways into a tree on the passenger side.

 

Two things you won't read in the paper:

 

As we were coming toward the bridge on the last lap on Saturday, some f*cktard tossed a beer can off the bridge on to the track.

 

On Sunday morning at about 1:00 am, some j*ckass coming out of the paddock in a Mustang was going too fast and missed the right hand turn on to the bridge.  He blew through the fence and ended up in the same location as the PTD car earlier in the day.

 

I've been to several Hyperfests in the past, and generally have had a good experience.  This was not one of those years.

[Chad Martin]

The fatal incident occured durring a hyperdrive?!?!   Sigh....well that should be the end of that experiment.   Those are supposed to be track touring laps a VERY LOW speeds, no helmets etc.  In no way should a car have been at a speed (during a hyperdrive) where it would have lost traction at all...much less had the momentum to slide off the track and wrap itself around a tree like that.

 

I guess NASA will have to go back to, "NOBODY, on track without a helmet".   Not that this would have saved that gentleman, but, HPDE 1 with lots of classroom and instruction is the place to start.

 

Instructing from the passenger seat is by far the most dangerous thing you can do in motorsport.

[LarryKing]

Both occupants were wearing helmets. A car making it to a tree line should never be possible at a race track.

[Sphinx]

Both occupants were wearing helmets. A car making it to a tree line should never be possible at a race track.

 

Unfortunately, that's not the case at a lot of tracks.  I remember when the WDCR used to run its annual autocross at SP on the Jefferson Circuit.  A friend's mom (whole family of autocrossers) managed to slide off track with her Boxter and hit some smaller trees, but did a lot of damage to the car.  This was circa 2000 or 2001.  She was an experienced autocrosser, not a rookie.

[Michael Colangelo]

The car with the fatality was a supercharged GTO (the mid-2000s version). 

[38bfast]

Very sad news. Very sad situation. Thoughts and prayers for the families. I pray we can learn so we don't have to read such tragic news again.