Indianapolis Motor Speedway (Speedway, Ind.) — After a week void of incidents ahead of the Indianapolis 500, a brutal crash with Alexander Rossi and Pato O’Ward among those involved left two of the best cars in the field with severe damage.
Rossi, O’Ward and Romain Grosjean, who also was involved, got out of their cars without assistance. Rossi, who was awake and alert and in good spirits, according to INDYCAR Medical Director Dr. Julia Vaizer, was taken to a local hospital for further evaluation.
“Man, we’re going so fast, and you know these cars are all on a knife’s edge — at least mine is — and that’s how you’ve got to run it if you want to be competitive,” O’Ward told me and other reporters after exiting the medical center. “And when you want to run there in the middle of the pack, these risks can happen. And it was just the wrong place, wrong time, and I’m just glad everybody involved is all right.”
Rossi was subject to several hard hits in the wreck, where he hit the wall, got two wheels off the ground and was later hit by a sliding O’Ward, who spun while trying to avoid the accident.
“I saw Rossi spinning, and it’s really tough to stop these cars especially in the middle of a corner when you smash the brake,” O’Ward said. “It’s obviously very heavy rearward [where the hybrid is located], and didn’t really have a lot of stopping power with how we all run the brakes.”
The same thing happened to Grosjean, whose car snapped when he tried to slam on the brakes.
“I had to go down to the left to avoid the cars on the right-hand side, and that was the highest point of G’s I had to brake, slow down — and slowing down, trying to go left, it just caught and spun,” Grosjean told me and other reporters. “S— happens.”
Teams were evaluating Monday whether they could repair the primary cars over the next few days with no track activity until Friday — the last couple hours of practice before the Indy 500 set for Sunday.
If teams go to backup cars, they still get to keep their starting position. For O’Ward, Arrow McLaren will go to a backup car (replacing the tub and rebuilding the car) at the shop (the team, like most, is based in Indianapolis) over the next few days.
“I’ve had plenty of hits here, so I’ll be able to get back in it just like nothing happened,” O’Ward said. “And I know my guys will be able to replace whatever it is that’s damaged to make sure that we’re right back where we were.”
This was the sixth practice of the Indy 500 weeks and the first, including qualifying Sunday, where there was an accident.
Just a day earlier, when asked at his post-qualifying news conference why there weren’t any accidents, Rossi said: “It’s no easier, I can promise you that. That was one of the harder qualifying days I’ve had around here.”
O’Ward indicated he didn’t feel it was just a matter of time when there would be an accident.
“You’re never thinking of crashing. If you’re thinking of crashing, it’s going to happen. There’s risks that you need to take into account when you do this — obviously, this is one of them.
“Even before the race, you need to put your car in situations that you’re going to be racing it, because otherwise then you don’t really get to work with whatever the race is going to throw at you. It’s just a matter of sometimes not something that you do, but you know someone else had an issue, and you’re just a passenger to the situation.”
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