Indy 500: Frightening testing incident invokes horrific memories

Things could have been much worse on Wednesday at Indy 500 testing. Thankfully for Will Power, among other IndyCar drivers, they weren’t.

On Wednesday and Thursday, Indianapolis Motor Speedway hosted a two-day IndyCar test session ahead of the 106th running of the Indy 500 next month, and it got off to an unexpected start, with multiple drivers experiencing a similar and quite bizarre issue on Wednesday after leaving the pits.

Andretti Autosport’s Alexander Rossi spun exiting the pits on an early installation lap, and his incident would be the least harmful of three significantly worrying incidents relating to pit exit at the four-turn, 2.5-mile (4.023-kilometer) oval in Speedway, Indiana.

Later in the day, Meyer Shank Racing’s Helio Castroneves lost control of his car in the warm-up lane section of the short chute between turns one and two, resulting in a spin that led to hard contact with the outside will in turn two.

While this was the incident that caused the most damage, it was hardly the most frightening.

A few minutes later, after the green flag came back out following the four-time Indy 500 winner’s wreck, several drivers turned laps around the track at full speed without issue.

But as Team Penske’s Will Power made his way out of the pits, he suddenly lost control of his car and began to spin up the track, right into oncoming traffic.

Have a look at his view.

No warning, nothing.

One driver, Andretti Autosport’s Colton Herta, had to take evasive action to avoid hitting Power’s #12 Chevrolet. Fortunately, his view — if you can even call it that — of the spinning car was enough to prompt a quick reaction, though he ended up spinning as a result.

The start of the incident looked eerily reminiscent of Alex Zanardi’s crash in the CART race at EuroSpeedway Lausitz in September 2001, one which resulted in the amputation of both of his legs above the knee.

Fortunately, Wednesday’s incident didn’t end the same way.

On lap 143 of 154 of the American Memorial 500 around three-turn 2.023-mile (3.256-kilometer) triangle-shaped track located near Klettwitz, Brandenburg, Germany, Zanardi made his final pit stop from the lead. When exiting the pits, he lost control of his car and spun up through the grass into oncoming traffic.

Patrick Carpentier came within inches of hitting Zanardi’s car, but Alex Tagliani wasn’t so fortunate, resulting in one of the nastiest collisions in the history of motorsports.

One can certainly hope that, more than two decades later, had Herta not managed to avoid Power, the safety of these machines has increased to the extent where nothing like this would ever happen again. We have certainly seen some major safety advancements made, especially in recent years.

Thankfully, we didn’t have to find out.

As for the pit lane exit issue itself, that proved to be the major talking point of the week, and it will surely remain a hot topic as the month of May nears. But given what we saw on Thursday, it appears as though a solution has been found and applied. Let’s just hope it isn’t temporary, because nobody wants to see what we saw Wednesday — or worse yet, what we saw in 2001 — ever happen again.