Paul Tracy has seen enough and wants a change.
The 2003 Champ Car champion, and Scarborough, Ont., native, took to Instagram in the wake of Robert Wickens’ terrifying, but thankfully non-lethal, crash Sunday at Pocono to get out his thoughts on track safety.
“Long day and sleepless night. Could not shut the brain down,” Tracy wrote in his post. So relieved that [Robert Wickens] will be OK, but that again was too close for comfort. It’s long overdue for the racing industry to start looking into a new way of retaining the cars inside the track without poles, fence and cable.”
Tracy is taking a pretty controversial view on the matters of track safety in his critique of fencing as that’s largely been put in place as a measure against parts, and even the car ,flying towards the fans, but the point he’s likely trying to make is that without these hard fences and poles in place to keep cars firmly within the track, the odds of a violent collision could lessen.
“If it were me I would have much rather gone out of the park,” Tracy continued.
The 49-year-old, who now occasionally works as a television analyst on IndyCar broadcasts, cites the fact we’ve seen the untimely death of Dan Wheldon and retirement of Dario Franchitti because of high-impact collisions into walls and fencing, and the same could’ve occurred to Wickens as well.
Finally, Tracy concludes his post with a call to action for everyone within the racing industry to “put our thinking caps on for the best solution and most cost effective one.”
Racing is a dangerous sport but, as Tracy alludes to, there has to be a better way to do this than what’s already in place.
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