We should be used to it by now, all the violence and death, or perpetually numb to it. That might be a better way, but somehow we are not.
And I’m not talking about the idiotic, senseless deaths of two bright young people that played out across live television in Virginia this week. You think when you get to my age that you have pretty much seen it all, and nothing will surprise you. But then something happens like that, and you realize that you have no words to describe it, no method to even process the information. The sheriff there got it right when he said that nobody should ever mention the killer’s name again.
No, this time it was another death that hit me, also played out in part on live television. Englishman Justin Wilson, 37, a native of Sheffield, England, died Tuesday from injuries sustained in an Indy car race at the Pocono Speedway in Pennsylvania last Sunday. A car ahead of him spun into the wall, and Wilson was struck in the head by a piece of flying debris, his own car crashing into the retaining wall after he was already unconscious.
Not his fault in any way, just a bad piece of racing luck. He had nowhere to go to avoid the flying metal that struck him, and he paid the price every racing driver knows he or she might one day have to.
Granted, nobody forces them into the race cars. In fact, it is very difficult to get a ride in one unless you are a wealthy and established superstar in the sport. Wilson, apparently, was neither, but he was much loved in the closed driving fraternity for his spirit and personality and, ironically his commitment to car and driver safety.
The late Ernest Hemmingway wrote this: “There are only three sports, bullfighting, motor racing and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.” They were called the “blood sports” back in the day, because they were the three most likely to get their participants killed if they were not highly skilled.
Race cars wreck all the time these days, just about every time NASCAR has a stock car race on television, one or more drivers hit the wall and go into lurid, part-shedding spins that, most of the time, everybody walks away from. But it wasn’t always like that.
Drivers of the Formula One cars in the 1950’s wore helmets that would fail a bicycle inspection today, and polo shirts and dress pants. No fire extinguisher in the car, no fire-proof clothing, no nothing. Just a lump of howling red-hot metal and gallons of high-test gas in thin aluminum tanks all around it. If you wrecked, you weren’t likely to walk away.
Things got slightly better in the 1960’s, when Nomex® fire-retardant suits came in, and Formula One cars got roll bars to offer some driver protection. The rate of attrition was still amazing, as in, of the 18 drivers highlighted in the book “The Fast and the Furious,” two made it to retirement. The rest all died in racing cars.
When I became a fanatic for racing at that time, I read every issue of “Sports Car Graphic” and “Road & Track” I could get my hands on, especially the Formula One coverage in R&T provided by the British scribe Henry N. Manney III. He knew everybody, and had the inside track on everything related to the sport.
And Manney wrote often about Jim Clark, the short, slender farmer who was known as “The Flying Scot” for his uncanny ability in a racing car. He always drove for the Lotus F1 team, winning multiple world championships in those fragile dark green cars. He even won the Indianapolis 500 when Lotus boss Colin Chapman stuffed a big Ford V-8 into one of those delicate rear-engined cars, to the consternation of A.J. Foyt and the Indy establishment.
But even Clark was not invincible, and he died when something broke on his Lotus Formula 2 car in a meaningless race in Germany 1n 1968 and he veered into the forest at 150 m.p.h.
His death shook motor racing everywhere. Veteran F1 driver Chris Amon summed it up best: “If it can happen to Clark, it can happen to any of us.”
But the racers kept on racing. And they always will, because they all think, like we all think, that it can’t happen to me.
But it can.
