Brunt on Wheldon: The razor’s edge

You likely flipped right by it on a football Sunday afternoon, because for all but the most devoted, open-wheel auto racing has become that kind of afterthought.

It wasn’t always thus, and the reasons for the sport’s decline certainly aren’t the point right now.

But really how many casual fans even knew that the IndyCar season finale was taking place in Las Vegas, that a championship was being decided between Will Power and Dario Franchitti, that the series’ most famous face – though she has won precisely one race – Danica Patrick, was driving her swansong before moving on to the big league of NASCAR, or that Dan Wheldon, from England, winner of this year’s Indianapolis 500, his second career victory at the brickyard, was included in the field only as the result of an odd and somewhat desperate promotional stunt?

Originally, IndyCar organizers had hoped to persuade three well-known drivers from other series to participate in this one race, with a $5 million prize on the line if they won.

But none bit. Had they, Wheldon wouldn’t have been racing on Sunday.

Instead, he became the gimmick. The series champ in 2005 had only run at Indy this year, reduced to doing television colour commentary because he didn’t have a ride. Wheldon would start 34th in the 34-car field, and if he won the race, would split the $5 million with a fan chosen by random draw.

Before the start, in front of a sparse crowd at a speedway in the brown and empty Nevada desert but just a stone’s throw from the Las Vegas strip, Roger Penske the legendary car owner was asked about the race to come. It was going to be fast, he agreed – practice times had hit 225 mph. On the banked corners, the cars could go three wide.

Dangerous, crazy dangerous, by definition.

But these days, so great have been the technical advances in racing, so secure are the driver’s cockpits, that the angel of death doesn’t hover as it once did – back in the days when the great columnist Jim Murray wrote the famous line for which generations of racing fans would despise him: “Gentlemen, start your coffins!” (It was noted back in 1982 that one quarter of all those who had driven at Indy since the first 500 mile race in 1911 had died in crashes, there or elsewhere.)

The multi-car wreck in Las Vegas on Sunday was fiery and horrific – but we have all become used to seeing the horrific, and then seeing drivers walk away unscathed.

This time, you knew from the way the safety crews reacted, knew from the looks on the pit crews’ faces, knew long before the official announcement came that this was different, that this was grave, that this time there wasn’t going to be a miracle.

Fans of NASCAR remember the day Dale Earnhardt died, the greatest star in the sport, his life snuffed out in an instant in a wreck that seemed innocuous. Many Canadians will think back to the CART race in Fontana, Cali., almost exactly 12 years ago – another season finale – and remember a bright, personable, funny kid named Greg Moore, the heir apparent, the next in a modern generation of great open-wheel drivers produced by this country; Scott Goodyear and Paul Tracy and Jacques Villeneuve. For some of us, the day he died was the day we decided to distance ourselves from the sport despite its visceral pull.

Forget about apportioning blame. Racing is as safe as a sport can be in which the cars move so fast, in so confined a space, and in which the drivers are programmed not by training, but by their DNA, to fight to be first.

They are not like the rest of us.

Racers race. They embrace the razor’s edge. They understand the risk, which for spectators, with fatalities so rare now, has become abstract, almost like a video game. Those behind the wheel know what is real, and that was why they wept openly when the sad news was made official, why there was no stiff upper lip, no pretending the show must go on, why they returned to their cars only for a five lap tribute, which surely will be the saddest image in sport this year.

In an as-told-to column he was producing for USA Today this past week, Wheldon talked about the challenges of getting his car up to speed, about the chances moving past the entire field to win the race, and then closed with these final words:

“As long as I can find some speed and keep up with the pack, I’ll do everything I can to put on a show.”

Death has been part of that show, far more than in anything else we consider sport. Not as it once was, thank god not with such regularity. But there’s no pretending otherwise.