Editorial

There's more than handwriting on the wall
and here's the concrete facts

 by Mark Cipolloni & Steven N. Levinson
September 18, 2002

UPDATED  Stats through May 29, 2005

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Let's face it, Motor Racing is a dangerous sport. It always has been and always will be. The inherent danger is part of its lure and its lore. Most fans like to see the driver flirt with danger and avoid tragedy. The loss of Ayrton Senna in Formula I and Dale Earnhardt in NASCAR made banner front page headlines, as well as sport page headlines. It also prompted both sanctioning bodies to react with rule changes attempting to deal with those tragedies.

The FIA has been more successful than NASCAR in reducing serious injuries and fatalities.  F1 has been accused by its detractors, "of sanitized tracks overrun with chicanes".  There is very little to "sanitize" on an oval track, except for perhaps "soft walls" and the paving of inside safety aprons.  In both CART and IRL, the sanctioning bodies have also tried to deal with the injuries.  CART has 1 reduced boost and horsepower, made the HANS Device mandatory and made changes to enhance cockpit and lower limb areas. The IRL has tried to soften its transmission (for rear impacts) and also modify its cockpit and seat designs to alleviate impacts.

Notwithstanding all the those efforts, it seems to be an inescapable conclusion, that racing open wheel, Indy Type cars on high speed ovals remains a dangerous endeavor. This year , as the table of injuries has demonstrated below, current technology and engineering have yet to produce a satisfactory response to the continuing number of injuries on oval tracks.

Gladiators of the Roman Empire fought in the great Coliseum and engaged in extreme battles resulting in severe injuries or even death.  The Gladiators of the modern era are Indy Car oval track racers in the IRL and CART.  The injury rate to the modern day gladiators is alarming, and we have compiled the statistics to prove just how brave (or desperate for a job, depending on where you sit) these men are.

This article isn't about CART vs. the IRL.  It's about the safety of the drivers in the CART and IRL Indy Car series.  Our research dates back to the inception of the IRL in 1996, for it was at that time that we had a better balance between ovals (IRL and some in CART) and road courses (CART). It's also as far back as we could find data for.   Still, it's enough data to have a reasonable assurance of statistical accuracy/trends.

Since 1996, when the all-oval IRL series was created, we suspected that the injury rate in Indy Car racing had gone up dramatically, but we didn't bother to compile the data until now.  The number of road course races stayed about the same (all in CART) but the number of oval races increased when the IRL came on board, and the combined total number of oval races and road course races between the two series in 2002 is currently split about 60/40 in favor of ovals.  Since 1996, 235 races weekends have been run between the two series.  60% have been ovals and 40% road and street circuits.

Because there were more ovals than road course races, one would expect the ratio of injuries to be about 60% on ovals and 40% on road courses if the two types of racing were equally as safe.  However, what we found was that in those 235 races, 90% of the injuries occurred on ovals and just 10% on road courses, a statistically alarming difference.  Of course road courses have gravel traps, energy absorbing barriers, and paved runoff areas to soften impacts.  Ovals tracks have nothing but hard concrete walls.

Of the 235 race weekends, 86 were IRL races and 149 were CART races, or 37% IRL and 63% CART.  Although CART had many more races, the number of injuries in the IRL were 127 to just 48 for CART.  In other words, the IRL had only 37% of the events, but 73% of the injuries.  That equates to an average of 1.443 injuries per race weekend for the IRL and 0.322 injuries per race for CART.  The data indicates, you are 448% more likely to get injured during an IRL race weekend than a CART race weekend. The numbers are disproportionately high for the IRL because they have so many ovals races. If we were to include all forms of auto racing (NASCAR, short tracks, dirt, SCCA road racing, etc. the number of injuries on ovals vs. road course would skyrocket even further.  No one is immune to the dangers of oval track racing, especially NASCAR and the IRL.

Let's examine the statistics in more depth.  In the table below is a list of all injuries and deaths that we could verify for in the IRL and CART since 1996.  Here is a summary of the data:

We'll let you draw your own conclusions from the data presented.  However, given the statistics, it's not inconceivable that the US Surgeon General might someday stamp a warning on all Indy Car oval races, similar to what they do on cigarette packs - "WARNING, The Surgeon General has determined that Indy Car oval track racing is VERY hazardous to your health."

Note:  we have exercised due diligence to fully and factually examine all the records available to us. We were not given records from either IRL or CART.  We may have accidentally left out some injuries, but any omission was unintentional, and due strictly to our lack of access to official records.  If better records become available in the future, we will update the statistics presented.  Indy Lights and Toyota Atlantic series injuries are not included because 1) injury records were not available to us, 2) the number of injuries in those two series are statistically insignificant, 3) at the time, the IRL did not have an equivalent ladder series to compare against.

Detailed Injury Listing

The authors can be contacted at feedback@autoracing1.com

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