IndyCar walks away from the Pocono Raceway – and its troubled legacy

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From the air, the second turn at Pocono Raceway doesn’t seem all that imposing. The corner that left Canadian IndyCar driver Robert Wickens paralyzed – after a horrific accident last year ended his record-setting rookie season – is a broad, sweeping curve with a straightaway on either end.

But at track level on race day, it’s a much different story.

“It’s what’s called a pucker corner,” said Nick Igdalsky, the chief executive officer of Pocono Raceway. “Your whole body puckers up – and you especially know which part in particular.”

At full speed, the banked left turn can give even the most seasoned drivers pause, particularly in a cluster of cars all vying for position, in a swarm of competing interests.

“It’s a corner that gets you,” Igdalsky said. “You’re going in there at over 200 miles an hour. You turn the wheel at any point at 200 miles an hour and it’s going to be a crazy corner.”

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Wickens’s life was forever altered there in August, 2018, when he tested the limits of Turn 2 early. On the seventh lap of his debut race at Pocono, he made a move to pass rival Ryan Hunter-Reay. Some saw it as a bold manoeuvre for such an early stage of the race. But for Wickens, it was in-character. He was aggressive and shrewd, and was winning races because of it.

But their tires touched for a split second and Wickens’s car was flung violently into the catchfence, shredding the vehicle to pieces and leaving the sport’s fastest-rising star with a catastrophic spinal cord injury, neck fracture and a host of other serious injuries.

Since then, one question has hung like a pall over Pocono: Is the track dangerous, or just cursed?

Less than a year and a half after the Wickens tragedy, IndyCar has walked away from the storied raceway, seemingly unwilling to wait around to find out the answer.

With three high-profile accidents in the past four years, beginning with the 2015 death of driver Justin Wilson, followed by Wickens’s paralysis and a crash this year on Turn 2 that sent another driver to hospital, Pocono leaves behind a troubled legacy.

Some drivers have called the track unsafe. Others have rushed to Pocono’s defence.

Watching this year’s race on television, Wickens lashed out angrily on social media after witnessing another pileup in Turn 2, which conjured memories of his own accident, and sent driver Felix Rosenqvist to hospital.

"How many times do we have to go through the same situation before we can all accept that an IndyCar should not race at Pocono," he said. "It's just a toxic relationship and maybe it's time to consider a divorce.”

“I think the answer is clear that we should not be here,” driver Sage Karam added. “I think it’s just not meant for IndyCars.”

In 2015, Karam’s car hit the wall at Pocono, scattering parts of the vehicle all over the track. One piece of debris ricocheted off the asphalt at high speed and struck Wilson in the helmet, killing the 37-year-old British driver.

“In my opinion, that question was answered a while ago,” Karam said.

Others in the sport struck back, including retired former champion Mario Andretti, who said Pocono was “not for sissies.”

The bitterness and finger-pointing has exposed a deep divide within the sport, wounds that are not likely to heal anytime soon.

But the man now at the centre of the storm insists the track has been unfairly impugned by the accidents. He insists it is neither cursed nor excessively unsafe, despite the series of events that have unfolded there.

“Yes, it’s a racetrack; yes, it’s dangerous,” Igdalsky told The Globe. “Dangerous more than others? I don’t think so.”

Officially, IndyCar said it left Pocono purely for business reasons. There were greener pastures elsewhere, at a newly renovated track in Virginia. Meanwhile, negotiations with the Eastern Pennsylvania raceway had stalled.

“I don’t really think it was anything in particular,” IndyCar president Jay Frye said in an interview. “It was really just a timing thing.”

But the details are murky. Asked if the issue of safety entered into the negotiations between Pocono and IndyCar, Igdalsky replied: “I’m going to no-comment on that one.”

But as Wickens struggles to teach himself to walk again – hoping to one day compete again, and fighting to not be left behind by the sport – the legacy of his accident is a complicated one.

A year later, the sport is no closer to ensuring any driver would walk away from the same crash if it happened again.

After Wilson’s death, IndyCar mandated a clear ‘aeroscreen’ that will shield the open-air cockpit of the cars starting next season. IndyCar also hopes the screen will prevent other accidents, such as the 2011 death of driver Dan Wheldon, who was killed when his head struck a pole after his car was launched into the catchfence.

However, dealing with the problem of catchfences themselves has been painstakingly slow.

Originally designed to keep cars from flying off the track into the fans, the barriers of steel mesh and poles are designed to absorb energy on impact. But their design also tends to shred cars to pieces – like a cheese grater – sending debris into the track and spinning or snagging the car violently on the fence.

Wickens’s accident was just that. When his car spun like a top into the catchfence, it snagged on the mesh and shattered to pieces, tearing an 80-foot hole in the structure.

While outer sections of the cars are designed to break apart on impact, as a way of absorbing energy to protect the driver’s cockpit, the sudden jarring of the crash is believed to be what left Wickens near death and unable to walk. It is the first time in IndyCar history that a vehicle’s black box data recorder was destroyed on impact, giving an idea of the force of the crash.

But few, if any, safety changes have come as a result of Wickens’s accident – in part because the sport can’t figure out or agree upon what it needs to do with the crash fence.

Proponents of change have argued for a clear Plexiglas structure, not unlike hockey boards, but bigger, that wouldn’t ensnare the cars. However, purists doubt such a structure would be able to sustain a collision and argue the cost is simply too high.

Others put their hopes in future technology, such as the use of magnetic forces that would invisibly keep the cars from flying into the grandstand without the need for a sudden impact. But those are distant solutions that require much technological advancement and money before they become a reality.

“Quite honestly, have you heard of anything other than a fencing system?” Igdalsky said, when asked about safety improvements. “We haven’t. As soon somebody invents it, I’d be happy to take a look at it.”

The only tangible change that’s come from Wickens’s accident, IndyCar said, is the redesign of a small fire extinguisher carried on each car. Previously, the ‘fire bottle,’ as it’s known, had no set place where it had to be mounted in the car, and crash inspectors noticed it came loose during Wickens’s accident. Now, the bottle is mounted in a standard spot near the driver’s feet, so that it doesn’t turn into a projectile.

But it’s not clear if the bottle had any role in Wickens’s injuries, compared with the impact with the fence itself.

With few safety solutions to offer up, IndyCar appears ready to simply move on from Pocono, putting the tragedies and controversy in the rear-view mirror.

For Wickens, the catchfence is both a problem and his saviour.

On one hand, it prevented his car from hurtling out of the track into a grove of trees beyond Turn 2. On the other, it changed his life forever.

“It’s not hidden that Pocono is one of the older tracks in terms of safety and you could see it on the track walks that the fences weren’t quite – I guess you could say, the upkeep wasn’t there,” he told The Globe and Mail this year. “But it’s not that you need a whole lot of upkeep on a fence. It’s either working or it’s not. And the thing is, the fence did everything it needed to do. It kept me in the track.”

“I actually asked that question: What would have happened if I just sailed through it. Because I actually almost went through the fence. There were trees [on the other side]. So what would you rather do? I don’t know.”

Early on, Wickens’s crash prompted renewed talk of safety improvements, but that talk has largely died down.

In many ways, the sport has returned to business as usual: the long-held belief that racing is just inherently dangerous, potentially deadly, and that everyone involved – including drivers and fans – accepts it. Like other racing circuits, from NASCAR to Formula 1, IndyCar knows that risk is part of the attraction. When it comes to attendance and television rights, it’s partly what pays the bills.

“It’s a dangerous sport, yes," Frye said. “We, as a league and series, do everything we can to mitigate it. And every time you have something happen, you learn something from it and then it’s our job to react to it.”

For Igdalsky, there is a cruel irony to Turn 2 that he argues has been overlooked.

Pocono Raceway, which is more of a triangle with rounded corners than an oval, was built as an homage to other famous tracks in the late-1960s. Turn 2 is a carbon copy of a turn at Indianapolis Speedway, site of the Indianapolis 500.

“The measurements and the physics of the corner are nearly identical,” Igdalsky said. “But people say, ‘Turn 2 is terribly dangerous.’ ”

However, since the track played host to its first race in 1971, the top-end speed of IndyCars has increased by nearly 85 kilometres an hour. Although the physics of the track remain unchanged, the same can’t be said for the cars.

Pocono will continue to play host to NASCAR races, in which the cars are slower and the drivers are less exposed, but for now, no one knows if IndyCar will ever be back. The legacy of Wickens’s accident may, in fact, be the end of an era in the sport.

For his part, Wickens has not moved on from racing. In the fall, he married his fiancée, Karli, leaning on a walker while he recited his vows. The new couple danced, with Karli bracing him as they swayed to the music and Wickens shuffled from side to side. It was a promise he fulfilled to her after the accident, that he would dance at their wedding. At the time of the crash, even some of his doctors thought he would never get there.

Returning to racing is another goal he refuses to surrender.

Last week, Wickens practised learning to walk with a cane, putting one tentative foot in front of the other during his latest round of intense physiotherapy. He’s still a long way off from walking normally, but it’s a start.

“I tried a couple months ago, and I couldn’t even take two steps,” he said on social media. “Today I was walking around at a snail’s pace. It’s days like today that make me want to work even harder.”