Former F1 driver Juan Pablo Montoya had an alarming moment during the Daytona 500 when something broke in his car and it spun him into a service vehicle, which was drying the track -using a jet engine. The result was a huge fire as aviation fuel, used to power the jet, spilled out and ran down the track. Fortunately Montoya and the truck driver were uninjured in the bizarre incident, which caused a two hour delay for the much-delayed event.
The race did not finish until the early hours of Tuesday morning, having started 30 hours behind schedule because of rain.
The race started with a multiple-car crash that wiped out the hopes of a good showing from Danica Patrick. She was caught in a shunt triggered when Elliott Sadler hit multiple champion Jimmie Johnson and sent him into the wall. The crash also took out last year’s race winner Trevor Bayne.
For all the troubles, NASCAR probably did better than expected with TV ratings, as the rescheduled took place at prime time on the East Coast and ran through the evening until after midnight.
Just watched it on youtube. Two very lucky guys.
I have to say that I think they made the best of a regrettable situation. I’ll be curious on how they do rating wise in the end? I have no doubt whatsoever that Juan Pablo’s crash into the jet dryer will make news shots all over the world, not to mention being a Youtube smash it as well. Your term of “Wild” is quite apropos for the entire race. Rain delayed, scheduled first at noon on Monday, then rescheduled for seven at night, Danica Patrick knocked out of contention along with five time consecutive champion Jimmy Johnson on the second lap, accidents including Montoya’s fireball, and a great finish with the most popular NASCAR driver, Dale Earnhardt Jr. trying to pull off a victory, just missing out only to finish second. The race carried all sorts of headline material, every time you turned around.
How many Columbians does it take to stop the daytona 500? Juan
You are my hero.
Nice one! I couldn’t pick a better man for the job.
Some good footage of the incident here: http://youtu.be/XEBjNh1GS
For unknown reasons, following that link gets me “malformed video URL” or something like that (maybe these redirectors are disliked), but bless the man, any search for Montoya takes me straight to the footage today!
A Television commentators nightmare lot’s of additional “Filler” required (in addition to all the usual yellow flag “filler”) with a 2 hour stoppage. Those “Good ole boys” did some serious gum flapping. This format of racing reminds me of basketball – give both teams 100 points and let them play for 2 minutes as it really boils down to the last few laps. Lot’s of action though with all the high speed wrecks, must be quite a spectacle to witness in person and I’m sure the sound of that pack of screaming engines going by must be awesome.
I forgot you are no longer allowed to write about Nascar according to some ranting individual yesterday. This fella missed the obvious point that Nascar thrives in America so from a business perspective F1 needs to learn from what they have done successfully as they run a hell of a lot more than 2 races, pack the stands and have massive sponsor participation and television contracts. Indycar although improving is the poor open wheel cousin.
While I am primarily an F1 fan the F1snobs better remember that Nascar pioneered the Hans device that fairly certainly prevented Kubica from paralysis or death in Montreal in 07, not bad for a bunch of Red Necks.
“While I am primarily an F1 fan the F1snobs better remember that Nascar pioneered the Hans device that fairly certainly prevented Kubica from paralysis or death in Montreal in 07, not bad for a bunch of Red Necks.”
Not quite….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HANS_device
Seems like NASCAR were one of the last race organisations to make it mandatory, and also their drivers the most outspoken about not using them…
But anyway, I agree with your sentiments about NASCAR as a whole. I personally love the sport, there’s something about something that big doing over 200mph. Also, they sound amazing, one of Jeff Gordon’s was at Goodwood when I went a few years ago, won’t forget that in a hurry!
The big pushrod V8′s have been in American racing for sixty years, not only in Stock Cars, but also in road racing as well. The sound is unbelievable, quite unique and absolutely impressive, to say the least. While today’s F1 engines are a shriek, the pushrod V8s can best be described as being thunder. Big, bass rooted sound that shakes the grandstand both from power and harmonics. To hear forty of these coming down the main stretch at Daytona, echoing in the grandstands to take the green flag, is an experience one never will forget. Every race fan should have a stock car race on their bucket list.
And Dale Earnhardt wasn’t wearing a HANS when he was killed, as they were not yet mandatory …
Andrew,
FYI the HANS device was used in Indy Cars way before NASCAR.
Thanks
Nigel
No, Joy for broadcast companies, says me cynically, as the ECJ came down on the side I thought they might, and ruled live sports are not copyrightable, but fillers (and presumably commentary*) are. I’m hoping since it’s pay TV we’ll get some more, err, pithy Brundleisms, but I am questioning my sense paying Sky when I get my news kicks here, and live sports are subject to no copyright.
(the real reason is the nearest dish to me is 7 stories above, and I don’t fancy legging it up there free climb to fiddle about to pull the right feed for RTL)
* I’ve yet to read the full decision. But this is a start at a guess how valuable presenter contracts are. Anyone left out ought to have hired Smithfield Partners, who got this decision, and apparently handle a driver also.
Andrew, fine point about HANS. Up yours to rallying safety, though. – j
You might want to have a look at the timeline of the Hans device:
http://hansdevice.com/site/images/Timeline%20400%201100%20pixels.jpg
Thank you, mvi.
Better quality video here:
Thanks for the link, Peter. Whoever was controlling that first camera must have been asleep to not follow a car as it spun. The incident did show a flaw in safety procedures when a racetrack is under a yellow but cars can run at full speed to catch up with the pack after a pit stop or being waved by. This may be something that F1 will need to think about if they start to move lapped cars around before restarting after a safety-car period.
That was a fixed camera position. It wasn’t on a gimbal mount so it couldn’t pan down. Since it looks like it’s position was inside the catch fence, it would be too dangerous for a live operator, who may have had his eyebrows singed if he were there. NASCAR doesn’t used the “dangle cameras” which are remote controlled and hang from the cranes you see around the European circuits.
The idea of drying a road with a jet engine is so deliciously American…
I am just remembering now how much I enjoyed JPM in F1. From his – deliberate in my view – “oh, thank you so very very much, my Sponsor Lords” – tugging forelock, to his “had enough of this politick tosh” speech, he was a lot of fun.
Look at it this way. In her first Cup race, Danica Patrick finished ahead of previous champions Kurt Busch, Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson. Or if the track was made inoperable by the JPM crash, the winner would have been Dave Blaney of the under financed Tommy Baldwin racing, the equivalent of HRT winning Monaco.
As Gordon Kirby pointed out in a column several months ago, NA$CAR has designed its car so it can stand up in multiple car crashes and give the the driver a very good chance of surviving. Whereas in the crash at Las Vegas that killed Dan Wheldon, Indycar was lucky it was just him.
In case anyone is interested, Matt Kenseth actually won NASCAR’s biggest race…
Billy London – great comment
Anon – they used jet driers at Santa Pod too. Probably still do.
Yeah, but it’s probably unlikely they unleash the drag racers whilst the jet drier truck is doing its job. That would be incredibly messy!
In spite of being an American and a motorsports fan, I know next to nothing about NASCAR (I love F1, though). I can’t believe they use a jet engine attached to a truck full of jet fuel to dry the track – while race cars share the track with it. What could possibly go wrong?
:^)
I’m LMAO at some of these comments regarding the jet dryers. Some making the point to the tune of “how could they let a jet dryer full of aviation fuel out on a track?” . Well, to start with, jet dryers have been active in both NASCAR and IndyCar for well over thirty years.They don’t come out during race conditions, they come out during caution periods when a pace car is on the track. Pace cars, by the way, have been in use in the US as long as I’ve been following racing…. about fifty years. Several years ago F1 decided to use them, but renamed them “Safety Cars”. I don’t know of a situation in the thirty plus years that jet dryers have been in use, where there was an incident with them. No doubt, after this, further refinements will be made to them to reduce the potential risks. However, it must also be noted that what happened with Juan was a freak occurrence. Freak occurrences happen in life from time to time. A commercial aircraft’s engine will fall off, once and a while. A brick will fall out of an overpass and smash into an on coming vehicle. A man will spontaneously burst into flames while crossing the street, or a race car will break something and hit a service vehicle during a caution period once in every thirty plus years.
Interesting that you chose to rant on about the history while glossing over the difference in the rules between the various motorsports which allowed Montoya to be going that fast under the pace car.
Fancy letting race cars out on a banked oval with a truck full of jet-fuel. Absolutely amazing stuff, you couldn’t make it up could you?
Talk about pulling a cat out of the bag, who does NASCAR get to write their scripts?
I hang with guys who trade jet fuel – not to a certain person who is broke – and the word is they should use the JP-7 A-50 type that needs TEB to ignite it. Much safer!
I think the challenge is that JP-7, being a specialist military fuel, is not available at your normal aviation fuel supplier, and I suspect it is expensive, since it is a custom fuel assembled from specialist blending stock, not a distillate fuel like standard JP-4, which is almost certainly what they were using in that (now ex-) jet drier rig.
It was meant as a joke, Graham!
Jet fuel is much less combustible than the petrol that F1 cars are filled with. Fancy allowing an entire grid full of Grand Prix cars filled to the gills with high octane petrol and allow them to drive at the limit on circuits lined with people!
I am not sure that is the case, but perhaps there is a fuel scientist out there.
Aviation fuel is much less refined than petrol and quite similar to kerosene. While certainly flammable, it’s not nearly as volatile as petrol. Had the truck carried petrol, it would have exploded immediately and all that would have been left of it would have been a burned out hulk. What we had was a fuel fire, not an explosion. Certainly the lesser of two evils, if one had to pick. I’m not a fuel scientist, but I do have experience with both fuels.
Regardless of the fuel type, Montoya didn’t seem too keen to hang around and find out about the relative burn rates.
I rather think it has to do with temperature of the fuel and its physical state.
I have an oil fired boiler which runs on 18 second kerosene which is almost exactly the same as what they use down the road to fuel the Typhoons, which again is almost the same as diesel. (it is known in Lincs that diesel cars can run on heating fuel). It all smells identical when the wind is from the south.
When cold it needs to be atomised, to ignite instananeously like petrol either by being forced through a nozzle or by having a NASCAR smash into it, creating all sorts of particle sizes. When atomised a spark will ignite it. Once a small part is burning the raised temperature will approach the flash point where it will go up anyway if a spark happens. Then as pointed out above it burns not explodes. (same thing really just different speeds of combustion)
Chris R, I believe in what you tell, but I was watching live and I had the clear impression the fuel immediately ignited (at first I thought was the race car’s fuel, I didnt know till then the track dryer was simply a jet engine).
from your explanation I realize the jet fuel tank blew from the shock of the car at speed (also it can be understood from the burst-like hole in the tank shown after fire was put down) but the relatively lower flammability of avigas or whatever the name does not seem to compensate the risks, from what we all could see 2 nights ago.
I was quite surprised in learning that a jet thrust is used for drying a race track, thought was some kind of big heated-air fan specially designed – as remarked above by a reader it’s so much northamerican.
in the end, looks like same kind of thinking that brought about a solution to a need of altering the excessive smoothness of one renewed track surface some time ago, and they used many gallons of cocacola to get it changed for a better grip.
in both cases it all sounds very rustico(=obsolete?), even though efficient and pragmatic (problem quickly solved).
One could perhaps be forgiven for thinking NASCAR has a serious desire to be in the Darwin awards this year!
And yet as pointed out above by Trevor, we have re-instated the “You may pass safety car to catch up to the back of the pack.” rule this year. When a driver does so is he still under the target lap time? (Obviously not, or he could not catch the pack, thus he is speeding past marshals working, v dangerous for the marshals and recovery crews) There would/will be no “safe” working period after the pack has passed before it re-appears. That was a good reason why originally the pit lane was closed during safety car deployment.
Also a great pity since with the tail enders physically in front of the leaders on a restart it gave an interesting few minutes before they got passed.
It’s not like the cars were actually racing while the jet dryers were on track.
And yes, NASCAR mandated the HANS before F1 and before many other forms of motorsports. No, they were not the first but I think the death of Dale Earnhardt Sr was a big wake-up call for the entire motorsport world and called for improvements all around.
It’s almost as crazy as refueling a formula 1 car in a crowded pit huh?
But we don’t do that these days.
And not as crazy as pressurizing the refuelling tanks! I know, we don’t do that anymore either.
You know a crash like that should pull in the ratings not the race.
Thanks Chris R above for perspective. If something equally extraordinary happened in F1, would the FIA go to such lengths so the race could be restarted?? Am far more an F1 fan, rarely watch Nascar, but their consideration for the fans is something. And noteworthy how many fans stayed to the finish at 1am.
In general, no, any one of the delays experienced at this years Daytona 500 would have pushed an F1 race outside of its allotted window (though from memory there was some tweaking of this as a response to last years Canadian GP).
That said I think generally F1 will run in conditions a bit wetter than NASCAR, though in recent years the sport has become decidedly softer in this regard.
I disagree. The cars behave different from one generation to the next. The modern F1 cars cannot be driven when there is too much rain. They simply go off the road.
You don’t disagree though, because you go on to state a reason that modern F1 cars cannot be driven when there is too much rain.
I was just stating what you reinforced, that an F1 race now is less likely to run in the wet than it was in the past and that respect the sport has become ‘softer’.
Sadly, the peripheral events were a lot more exciting than the race itself. NASCAR needs to lop 15 degrees off the banking at Daytona and Talledega, then they can dump the restrictor plates, and actually, you know, end up with cars that require the drivers to lift in the corners, and which need to be set up correctly and driven properly most of the way round the circuit. The current drafting lottery is not racing, Dale Earnhardt was vociferously critical of this style of racing, and I can exactly why.
I think they should just ditch the oval. That would solve the problems real quick.
“Drafting Lottery” -brilliant term for it.
Sometimes opinions expressed leave me wondering if they crawled out of the wood work or lept off the wall!