Why Crutches Don't Stop Injured INDYCAR Drivers From Racing At 200 MPH

In Driver's Eye with James Hinchcliffe, the six-time INDYCAR winner will bring you inside the mind of a racer while breaking down the nuts and bolts of the sport for fans.

Racing is risky. There are no two ways about it. From the sport's inception, there has been an inherent danger. 

That said, drivers today are incredibly lucky to race in the era they do. Safety is something INDYCAR, the tracks and the partners — not to mention the drivers! — take very seriously.

Something is learned from every accident, and pushing safety forward is a never-ending endeavor. This is without doubt the safest era to be a professional racing driver. But at the end of the day, we are still driving faster than 200 miles an hour beside concrete walls, and it will never be 100 percent safe.

Unfortunately, that was confirmed at the Indianapolis 500 when both Alexander Rossi and Josef Newgarden suffered separate crashes that left them with minor injuries. And crutches.

Yet both drivers competed the following week in Detroit. While the specifics of each injury haven't been shared, they seem to be similar in nature, yet completely different in the challenges they presented each driver.

Rossi’s issue was with his right ankle, which is the throttle foot. 

At the Indy 500 — where he also competed with the injury after crashing in practice and undergoing minor surgery — the track is smooth. So the typical amount of throttle modulation over a lap is quite a bit less than the twisty street circuit in Detroit. 

Trying to carefully accelerate on a dirty, bumpy street circuit with 750-ish horsepower at your disposal requires a delicate finesse with that right foot. Much harder when your foot isn’t at 100 percent. 

Add into it the bumpy nature of the track, and the floor of the car regularly and violently bottoms out over bumps, sending shock waves through every inch of your body, including your injured foot. A challenging proposition, to say the least.

Newgarden also had an issue with his foot, but it was his left foot. The braking foot. This is where the challenge is completely different. 

For all the finesse required for your throttle foot, you need brute force in the braking foot. 

INDYCAR drivers hit the brake pedal as hard as they physically can on the initial hit of a big brake zone, like Turn 3 at Detroit. Several hundred pounds of pressure on the pedal translates to several thousand pounds of pressure through the brake system.

And while that strength is key, arguably more important is how you control the brake release — coming off the brake pedal as the speed bleeds off so you get closer to the corner. This technique is what drivers spend their whole career refining. 

It’s one of the main areas that separates a professional from an amateur: The ability to feel the grip in the tires and constantly modulate the brake pressure to maximize brake efficiency without locking up a tire.

If you are battling an injury to the brake foot, it can completely change the muscle memory that comes from decades of racing with a healthy left leg. Trying to retrain your brain to undo what is essentially second nature can be massively difficult.

When you consider these challenges, it makes it all the more impressive that Rossi was in podium contention until an ill-timed full-course caution, and Newgarden battled back from a poor starting spot to be the biggest mover of the race and secure a top-10 finish.

Walking on crutches but piloting a race car at 200 miles an hour is a wild juxtaposition. 

But it’s important to remember that while these are impressive feats, safety is never compromised. And the decision of whether drivers are cleared to race isn't up to them — and for good reason.

As much as we drivers take safety seriously, leaving that decision up to someone who straps into a ground-based rocket ship for a living might give skewed results! That’s why medical teams utilize comprehensive tests drivers must pass before they can get back behind the wheel.

Somewhat like other sports — football and hockey come to mind — if there is no risk to others and low risk of long-term damage to themselves, athletes are often willing to fight through a bit of discomfort to play the game. At the end of the day, the passion for the sport burns hotter than any pain in the body while they compete.

Back to the ovals! 

This weekend, we are at World Wide Technology Raceway in Madison, Illinois, near St. Louis, for a race under the lights. Prime time. Sunday night. 

And you might be thinking everyone should be pretty up to speed turning left, considering we just spent two weeks driving around an oval at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. But you’d be wrong.

Though both ovals, the similarities between these two tracks end there. 

We talk about Indy's four identical corners that you have to drive through differently in subtle but important ways. 

But St. Louis' 1.25-mile track has two ends that are completely different! Turns 1 and 2 are tight radius and high-banked. Turns 3 and 4? Much flatter and a more open radius.

The difference, end to end, presents some pretty big challenges for teams and drivers. 

As a driver, you have to approach these corners very differently. In Turns 1 and 2, you will bleed off almost 40 miles an hour of speed through lifting — and sometimes even a bit of braking in the race. Turns 3 and 4 are ideally flat-out in qualifying, so it’s all about limiting scrub, meaning grinding the front tires by turning the steering wheel too much.

From a setup standpoint, it’s very difficult to navigate and all about compromise. 

The ideal setup at one end won’t feel good at the other. The biggest mistake drivers make here is trying to chase the perfect balance the whole way around. Even trying to get one end to feel really good, knowing it will make the other end trickier, rarely works.

The key to this race track is getting comfortable being uncomfortable. It will never feel perfect at either end, so finding the most OK-ish balance at both ends usually yields good results.

For me, Turns 1 and 2 are the best part of this track. 

You approach Turn 1 at nearly 200 miles per hour, and the banking is so steep it looks like you’re staring at a wall. You head into that turn at speed the first few times and think to yourself, "There is no way I am making it around this corner." 

Between the banking helping you turn and the incredible capabilities of an Indy car, it all works out! 

And there is a lot you can do as a driver on that end of the track in the race. 

You can go in deep to try and make a pass, you can ease up the entry and focus on a mega run out to set up a pass for Turn 3. You can get creative with lines quite a bit more than in Turns 3-4, which is why we see so much action there in the race.

The fast, frantic nature of short-track racing in INDYCAR highlights something else that I think is pretty impressive about what these drivers are doing on track. 

Surely, if you’ve been watching our races on FOX, you’ve seen the Driver’s Eye camera that gives the most realistic sense of what it’s like inside the car. It also gives you a glimpse into how much information the drivers are digesting from the dash on the steering wheel. 

The wheel is really the brain of the race car. 

On the back, the driver has paddles to control up shifts and down shifts and the clutch for leaving pit lane, as well as hybrid controls. The front has a litany of buttons and knobs used to do everything from talk to the crew, take a drink of water, control the speed in pit lane or even change the handling of the car.

The dash itself looks like a losing level of Tetris with all these different colored boxes stacked together, displaying different types of info to the driver. 

Things like lap time, lap count, distance to cars in front and behind, tire temps, brake temps, balance settings, engine settings… I could go on!

At a track like St. Louis, where a lap time is something in the low 20-second range, you spend more than half your lap cornering. 

That means you have a little less than 10 seconds per lap — split between the frontstraight and backstraight — to look down, absorb and digest certain info off the dash and then make a decision based on what you saw. 

And, again, all while racing wheel-to-wheel with 24 other cars at crazy speeds!

Needless to say, these drivers will be earning their money on Sunday night, and based on what we’ve seen of the short oval package that INDYCAR has developed, it should be a heck of a race!

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