IGX

One one hand, fuck the guy getting out of his car and walking on a dark track in a race. On the other hand, fuck Tony Stewart, that looks pretty clearly like vehicular manslaughter. Motherfucker should be done racing.

Pinky wrote:

nafod wrote:Neither of them was as stupid as both of them together.

This sums it up nicely.

The dead driver was all of 20 y.o. so it's extra sad.

Canandaigua is in the beautiful Finger Lakes and it's very rural farm country so I wouldn't be at all surprised if the local sheriff gets the NY State popo involved. This will probably end up being the biggest thing in auto racing since Dale Earnhardt was killed so there are going to be all kinds of conflicting pressures on the local authorities. A spectacle of early OJ proportions is about to unfold.

Here's the thing...there's a fucking video out there for a whole bunch of slowing down and going around the guy, then here comes Tony Stewart, too fast and he fucking nails him.

I only watched it once but wasn't the guy immediately in front of Stewart going about the same speed? And if you look at how fast they come back around after the guy spins out, the track must've been pretty short, which means they went under caution probably just seconds earlier. It looks to me like the guy in front peels off and Stewart doesn't have much time to react, like when someone swerves around something int eh middle of the highway and you get the "oh shit!" reaction time.

Far cry from Stewart the madman gunning around the track for the guy.

It's a chain of stupidity, culminating in a young man's death.

Would Ward have been punished for coming out like that if he had lived? From comments elsewhere, it sounds like racing fans love it when drivers come out to physically challenge others so this kind of behavior is generally tolerated.

The initial reaction, before bad PR forced people to reconsider, that Stewart would race the next day (or a couple days later) and that it was business as usual. You go out of your way to hurt another player in the the NBA or NFL and you are going to be missing a few games.

Reports are that Stewart always had a camera inside the car and a mic to his crew but they haven't provided either to investigators. My guess is that his comments would confirm the theory that he was trying to scare of show up the guy by coming close to him.

Seems to me that if you are under a caution, one of the first things you do is start paying attention to the track. You could have fire crews or safety crews doing clean up, plus you could have debris on the track. Last thing a driver wants to do is mess up their car on some debris and end up having to drop from the race.

So you watch the line of cars in front of you as they navigate around potential obstacles. Other cars miss Ward, the #45 was close, and he did a small correction to keep away from Ward. Stewart was about 1.5 seconds behind that, and to my mind should have seen it. If you trig it out, 1.5 seconds at 40mph, Stewart had to deviate about 3 degrees to not hit him.

in activities that operate at the edge, race driving, base jumping, football to mention three, being killed or disabled isn't entirely unexpected. there's bad judgment at work here, but that's humans being human.

the kid made a mistake, and stewart failed to take full precautions. 1 + 1 = dead.