IndyCar driver Ryan Briscoe was unhurt in an accident at Auto Club Speedway Saturday night that saw his Schmidt Peterson Motorsports Honda go airborne and come to a rest on the infield grass.
Briscoe, who was filling in for an injured James Hinchcliffe in Fontana, was battling for position on the inside lane with Ryan Hunter Reay. Team Chevy’s Juan Pablo Montoya appears to clip Hunter Reay’s outside right corner as he turns in, sending Hunter Reay’s car sliding across the track and taking Briscoe’s car with him. As Briscoe began to slide backward, his car caught air and hit ground violently before coming to a complete stop.
The accident was reminiscent of the airborne crashes at the Indianapolis 500, which raised concerns about the aerodynamic properties of this year’s cars. Luckily Briscoe was unhurt in the incident and appeared relatively unaffected in a post-race interview.
“With a lap to go, in our position, I had some momentum coming down the front stretch,” said Briscoe. “I was going to take that low line into 1 and 2 and felt like we were going to come home with a top three, for sure. Unfortunately, Hunter-Reay got turned around, I had nowhere to go and she went flying. Thankfully, I’m all right and no big deal. Now we look forward to the next one.”
Check out the video of the Briscoe’s wreck in the video below. The Australian will climb back behind the wheel of the Schmidt Peterson Motorsports Honda on July 12th for the ABC Supply 250 at Wisconsin.
Comments
I said it during the Indy 500 and I’ll say it again. NASCAR FLAPS. Every NASCAR at every level has flaps in the bodywork
designed to catch air and flip up, preventing the car from launching into the air when facing backwards. With all the
intense development work on aero packages this year for the Indy series cars – they forgot to engineer flaps in the
side pods that simply deploy upwards when the car gets situated backwards. When a car is travelling backwards at
a high rate of speed, it is “dirty” and all it’s expensive design features intended to glue the car to the pavement basically
work in reverse to flip the car up into the sky like a leaf in the wind. Notice Ryan Hunter Reay’s yellow car lifting up too, ready to launch, but Briscoe’s car basically cuts off the airflow to Reay’s car before it reaches a point high enough to flip.
Indy needs ( stat! ) to employ NASCAR-type flaps to prevent this or it will happen again-and-again until someone dies.