On Monday, April 30, 2001, at 05:41 AM, Phillip Osborne wrote:
> I left the autocross early yesterday at Pennington Field down in
> Bedford, and
> heard on the radio that there was a near riot pending at Texas Motor
> Speedway.
> It seems that the CART drivers, after practicing on the super speedway,
> hitting speeds in excess of 235MPH, decided that the speeds were too
> great,
> and some of the drivers had experienced vertigo during warm up and
> practice
> runs, they would not run the race. This left 60plus thousand drivers
> sitting
> in the stands anxiously awaiting the race start, only to hear that it
> wouldn't
> happen. Several fans who were visably upset carried large signs with
> unprintable language, describing the drivers as WIMPS, with no balls!
> I don't
> know, VERTIGO at 235...Yeah, I'm a wimp too...
It wasn't vertigo, the cars were exceeding 5 Gs vs the "normal" 3Gs
usually found on CART tracks and 20 of the 24 drivers were experiencing
visual impairments to partial blackouts if they exceeded 10 laps. Given
this it was decided it was best to postpone the race until something
could be done about it (either to the cars or the track). The reason it
happened at the last minute is that every driver thought it was just
them and it was only after they compared notes that they realized that
it was a universal problem.
http://www.speedvision.com/pub/articles/racing/03CART/010429b.html
- Alan Dahl
--------------
Alan Dahl home:
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Federal Way, WA, USA work: Alan.Dahl@PSS.boeing.com
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