IndyCar: Is Pocono Raceway to blame for recent crashes?

Is Pocono Raceway to blame for several recent violent IndyCar crashes that have taken place at the track, most notably last year and this year?

It happened again.

Green flag lap #1 in an IndyCar race at Pocono Raceway produced a five-car wreck in turn two of the three-turn, 2.5-mile (4.023-kilometer) oval in Long Pond, Pennsylvania, and one of those cars ended up in the catch fence.

Fortunately, the driver whose car ended up in the fence, Chip Ganassi Racing rookie Felix Rosenqvist, was not left paralyzed from the waist down like Schmidt Peterson Motorsports rookie Robert Wickens was one year ago.

Here's how drivers saw the Lap 1 incident at @PoconoRaceway. #ABCSupply500 // #INDYCAR pic.twitter.com/Kv4C25557p
— NTT INDYCAR SERIES (@IndyCar) August 18, 2019

Nevertheless, this wreck reignited a debate that never truly cooled off from last year amid talks of Pocono Raceway’s future, or lack thereof, on the IndyCar schedule.

Should Pocono Raceway remain on the IndyCar schedule?

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We entered this past race weekend knowing that Pocono Raceway could very well end up being left off future IndyCar schedules for attendance issues. However, attendance has continued to rise since the track was added to the schedule six years ago. To date, the crowd for the rain-shortened race there this past Sunday was the largest since then.

If Pocono Raceway ends up being left off the 2020 schedule, it is safe to say that attendance will not have been the biggest factor, if any factor at all, especially considering what has gone down at the track when the green flag has flown in each of the last two years.

But is it fair to blame Pocono Raceway itself for this mayhem?

This past Sunday’s wreck didn’t even originate in turn two. It began in the straightaway between turns one and two and Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing’s Takuma Sato turned slightly left into Andretti Autosport’s Alexander Rossi, causing a chain reaction.

Are we really going to blame Pocono Raceway for a wreck that happened with cars going straight, just like they do at any other circuit? This was driver error, through and through. It was completely unnecessary.

Additionally, last year’s wreck took place when Wickens tried to pass Andretti Autosport’s Ryan Hunter-Reay going into turn two, and he attempted to pull out of this attempt too late. The cars of the two drivers ended up sticking together as they spun up the track, and that is what led Wickens’s car to get into the catch fence.

Of course, “driver error” is not really accurate when describing Wickens’s accident considering the fact that one of the race’s two scheduled practice sessions was canceled and the drivers had next to no time to adapt to the track in what was the first season of the new UAK18 aero kit. Plus, Wickens was a rookie who had never raced into turn two at Pocono Raceway, and he did try to get out of this move.

With the new UAK18 aero kit last year, nobody really knew what to expect aside of the fact that it would be hard to pass, which it was, at a track where passing had been almost too easy with the previous aero kit that featured a lot more downforce.

With hardly any practice time for this race in 2018 due to rain, drivers tried to make up as much ground as possible on lap one without really knowing what their cars were capable of. “Driver error” is a stretch in this case and probably a little bit harsh.

However, “track error” is not only more harsh, but it is simply untrue.

Pocono Raceway has actually produced some of the tamest races from a wreck standpoint that IndyCar has seen since it returned to the schedule in the 2013 season, and that is quite impressive considering the fact that it has hosted a 500-mile race in six (five factoring in the rain-shortened race of the past weekend) of its seven consecutive seasons on the schedule.

Only once has it featured more than four caution flag periods, and that was in 2015 when it featured 12, including the one that caused the death of Justin Wilson when a piece of debris struck his helmet (which had nothing to do with the track itself).

In 2013, it featured two caution flag periods. In 2014, it featured one, and it resulted in an all-time record average completion speed for a 500-mile race of 202.402 miles per hour.

In 2016, it featured four caution flag periods. In 2017, it featured three, and in 2018, it featured two, although only one, the one involving Wickens, took place when the race was actually green. This year, it featured four, but only three of these four took place as a result of on-track incidents.

Now compare that to the Indianapolis 500 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. This year’s Indy 500 was the first Indy 500 to feature fewer than five caution flag periods with four since the 1990 Indy 500 also featured four. The fastest average completion speed for the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing” is 187.433 miles per hour, and it was recorded in 2013 in a race that featured five.

Not only that, but how about all the practice crashes that took place ahead of the 2015 Indy 500? How about the one that nearly killed James Hinchcliffe? How about the qualifying crash experienced by Sebastien Bourdais for the 2017 Indy 500, and how about the airborne crash experienced by Scott Dixon, arguably the most bizarre crash in IndyCar history, during the race itself that originated with a car doing literally nothing more than brushing the wall?

And this is just Indianapolis Motor Speedway alone we’re talking about here.

But if anybody ever even hinted at the subject of the Brickyard being removed from the schedule, they’d be practically eaten alive. Let’s also not forget the fact that turn two of Pocono Raceway is modeled after Indianapolis Motor Speedway with nine-degree banking and what is roughly a 90-degree turn.

The crashes at Pocono Raceway are not the only violent crashes that take place in IndyCar. There are certainly aspects of the track that lend itself to an above average threat of danger, but that is the case at parts of any oval track and really any track, period. The track itself is not to blame for this mayhem.

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Instead of blaming Pocono Raceway for the disasters that have recently happened there in IndyCar, it would be a lot more accurate and smarter to accept that the track is not responsible for dangerous driving, other driver errors and other factors that are not being properly addressed, such as a lack of practice time in a car with a relatively new aero kit that takes a lot of getting used to on superspeedways, particularly because of its lack of downforce.

Not only does refuting this sentiment create a slippery slope for future nasty wrecks at other tracks, of which hopefully there are none, but it also does nothing to combat the real issues that cause these nasty wrecks to begin with. Pocono Raceway is not to blame for drivers making mistakes among other factors that result in disasters, and that fallacy can only do harm to a series in the midst of growth.