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IndyCar: Fans now ridiculously blaming Ryan Hunter-Reay for Pocono wreck

By Asher Fair

FORT WORTH, TEXAS - JUNE 07: Ryan Hunter-Reay of the United States, driver of the #28 DHL Honda, stands on the grid during US Concrete Qualifying Day for the NTT IndyCar Series - DXC Technology 600 at Texas Motor Speedway on June 07, 2019 in Fort Worth, Texas. (Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images)
FORT WORTH, TEXAS - JUNE 07: Ryan Hunter-Reay of the United States, driver of the #28 DHL Honda, stands on the grid during US Concrete Qualifying Day for the NTT IndyCar Series - DXC Technology 600 at Texas Motor Speedway on June 07, 2019 in Fort Worth, Texas. (Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images) /
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IndyCar fans who can’t stand the idea of not having somebody to blame for Sunday’s wreck at Pocono Raceway are now ridiculously blaming Ryan Hunter-Reay.

When five cars ended up in the wall with one in the fence on the opening green flag lap for the second consecutive IndyCar race at Pocono Raceway, Takuma Sato was the first to be blamed since it originally appeared that an abrupt movement of his car to the left is what caused the initial contact between him and Alexander Rossi.

Skip ahead a few seconds, Felix Rosenqvist ends up in the fence, and now the three-turn, 2.5-mile (4.023-kilometer) oval itself is supposedly to blame.

Now here we are several days removed from the incident. Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, Sato’s team, released a statement and a video illustrating that even if Sato’s arrival on the scene is what caused the accident, he didn’t come in like a crazy man like it initially appeared.

This video effectively vindicated him, especially considering the initial backlash he faced afterward.

So now fans need somebody new to blame.

Enter Ryan Hunter-Reay.

Hunter-Reay was on the inside of Rossi when Sato and Rossi initially made contact between turns one and two at the track in Long Pond, Pennsylvania.

Fans are claiming that he “crowded” Rossi, sending Rossi into Sato.

But the 2012 IndyCar champion and 2014 Indianapolis 500 winner is having none of it, and justifiably not.

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For the record, nobody is denying that he moved up. But at no point was he even close to “crowding” Rossi. He moved up because he had room to do so, and at that point, it was just him and Rossi in a two-wide situation. Sato was the third one to arrive on the scene to make it three-wide, and that’s when all hell broke loose.

Some fans have even sunken so low as to say that Hunter-Reay is the “common denominator” in these crashes at Pocono Raceway, effectively meaning that they are blaming him for the similar five-car wreck that resulted in the paralysis of Robert Wickens last year.

Really, that should mitigate their argument right then and there.

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But to those who insist that this incident is Ryan Hunter-Reay’s fault, congratulations on not being able to analyze a frame-by-frame replay of a split-second hundreds of times over the course of five or six days just to share with your Twitter fam the false accusation that “Oh yeah that’s definitely on RHR, bruh”.

Now try actually experiencing that same moment — in real-time, in an IndyCar race — at over 220 miles per hour.

Grow up, move on and accept the facts instead of trying desperately to find someone new to pin this on.