IndyCar still shaken by Wheldon’s death

It was exactly one year ago, a day not unlike today: Warm, bright, ideal. Only a storm was brewing at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Everybody saw the dark clouds rolling in before the ladies and gentlemen even started their engines for the IndyCar season finale.

• There were lightning-fast cars, 34 of 'em, more than usual - more than they start at the Indianapolis 500, where the oval is a mile larger.

• There was a lightning-fast track. Since the Indy cars last had raced at LVMS, the oval had been reconfigured. Repaved. Its higher banks produced higher speeds. Multiple racing grooves. And pack-style racing that is exciting to watch, but leaves virtually no room for error.

• There is a racing adage that says to finish first, one must first finish. Not on this day. There would be new cars in 2012, rendering these obsolete. There was no reason to take care of the equipment, as the drivers like to say.

• Because there were roughly 10 more cars than usual, there were roughly 10 more drivers than usual. Many were not accustomed to racing at 220 mph in a huge, snarling pack.

• Dan Wheldon, the popular 33-year-old two-time Indianapolis 500 champion, would start from the back regardless of where he qualified. If he charged through the field to win, he and a lucky fan would split $5 million as part of a promotion.

This wasn't an ordinary storm brewing. This was George Clooney steaming toward the Flemish Cap in pursuit of a massive haul of swordfish.

This was The Perfect Storm.

"It's friggin' fast here ... the race is going to be crazy and the crashes are going to be spectacular," Danica Patrick had warned during practice after climbing out of her car.

There was only one crash. It happened 11 laps into the race. It involved 15 cars.

When the fires were put out, Dan Wheldon was dead.

It has been a full year, but the sport still hasn't gotten over it.

If you go on the Yahoo! IndyCar web page, there are links to three archived stories under "Video Spotlight." One asks if IndyCar misses Danica, who has moved on to NASCAR. The second says Dario Franchitti would give his season for another Indy 500 win. The third says Dan Wheldon's absence is felt at Indy.

That story about Wheldon was posted on May 24. It's still up there. The racing world still grieves for Dan Wheldon.

The impact of his death still is being felt.

The redesigned cars, for which he did much of the testing, are slower and safer. Body panels around the rear wheels have reduced the likelihood of cars getting airborne in a crash.

Pack racing has been eliminated, at least on the IndyCar circuit. And when you hear no less a star than Dale Earnhardt Jr. refer to pack racing as "ridiculous" and "bloodthirsty" after suffering a concussion in a 20-car pileup at Talladega, you wonder when NASCAR is going to get around to addressing the problem.

Though IndyCar recently completed its season without major incident, and staged a safe - and exciting - race on the fraught-filled 1.5-mile oval at Texas, it canceled its race at Las Vegas. The series recommends more testing be done before a return is considered.

It didn't recommend that all tears should dry before further testing is done, which, if you ask me, is the real reason the Indy cars didn't race at LVMS this year. That, and should there be another gruesome crash - which is always possible in motor sports, regardless of how safe you make the cars - there would be difficult questions to answer, and IndyCar chose not to answer them the first time it happened.

LVMS president Chris Powell was left to answer the difficult questions by himself, and that hardly seemed fair. And here is it is, a year later, and it still doesn't seem fair.

There are only three programs on my DVR that I have designated not to be erased. One is a documentary of Bruce Springsteen explaining the thought processes that went into his "Darkness of the Edge of Town" album in 1978. The other two are Indy car races.

I saved the 1971 Indy 500 because people get a kick out of watching a young pit reporter named Dave Letterman interview an equally young - and disgruntled - Mario Andretti after he crashed out.

I saved last year's IndyCar finale at LVMS in preparation for this day, thinking that watching it a year later might provide a different perspective upon which to write.

I still couldn't bring myself to watch it.

But Monday morning, I finally did get around to reading the official Las Vegas Accident Investigation report dated Dec. 15, 2011.

It is thorough, 49 pages long, and there are thousands of words, tens of thousands, and there are computer readouts from the cockpits and autopsy findings and commentary from all the experts, with the exception of Jackie Stewart and Chris Economaki and the Fram Oil Filters guy.

All of it suggests that none of the reasons listed above caused a popular driver to die - or that all of them did - and that it was just "one of them racin' deals," albeit a terribly sad and wretched one.

Under "Overall Conclusions," it states several factors coincided to produce a "perfect storm" that killed Dan Wheldon. But that none can be singled out as the sole cause of the tragedy.

On page 17, there is a picture of Wheldon's car flying through the air. It is upside down, a fraction of a second before it would smash into the catch fence in Turn 2, driver side first, with deadly force. There is tire smoke, and there is fire, and there are other cars flying through the air in this photo. There is mayhem wherever one looks.

In the foreground, you can see the torsos of three men in the infield. One has yet to react. The second has his hand on top of his head, as if he can't believe the magnitude of the crash.

The third man has both arms raised high above his head and appears to be cheering.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski