"JEM" (jem)
08/25/2015 at 18:19 • Filed to: INDYCAR
5
1|
"JEM" (jem)
08/25/2015 at 18:19 • Filed to: INDYCAR | 5
| 1 |
This is one of the best articles I’ve read today about JW. I appreciate the honest and raw emotions from a longtime Indycar person who worked closely with him. Also, it gives some frank insight into the accident, saying how much of a freak thing it was.
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Justin Wilson’s family often traveled with him to the races on the IndyCar schedule, but with school already starting Julia and his two young daughters, Jane and Jessica, did not make the trip to Pennsylvania for last week’s race at Pocono Raceway. So Wilson took the time to visit a group of sick children at a Geisinger-Bloomsburg Hospital in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. He thought he would cheer up the sick and injured kids with his warm personality and charming smile.
That is the type of man that was Justin Wilson. For as great as he was behind the wheel of an IndyCar the seven-time IndyCar race winner was an even better man.
And that is the way his long-time friend and former team manager at Newman Haas Lanigan Racing and Dale Coyne Racing would like to remember him.
Mitch Davis is now the team manager at A.J. Foyt Enterprises. His heart sank and his emotions were evident on his face when told after Sunday’s race that INDYCAR had quarantined Wilson’s race car. The 58-year-old Davis has been in the racing game long enough to know that quarantined race cars are only done in fatal or potentially fatal crashes so that a thorough diagnosis can be made to determined what happened.
In this case, it was an eight-pound nosecone - which measures 30-inches long by 14 inches in diameter and bullet-shaped to six-inches in the front - that sailed through the hair and hit Wilson’s helmet as he was traveling at over 200 mph.
Davis had experienced the best of times with Wilson. The two celebrated together in victory lane after Wilson won the 2008 Belle Isle Detroit Grand Prix. When the United States economy crashed later that year, Wilson was out of a ride and Davis went to work for Dale Coyne Racing - at that time a rather irrelevant team that had little funding owned by former race driver Dale Coyne.
Davis convinced Coyne to hire Wilson and engineer Bill Pappas believing the combination would be competitive.
In July of 2009, Wilson drove Coyne’s Honda-powered car to victory at Watkins Glen - the first win for the team in 558 races and 25 years. Davis had moved on when Wilson drove Coyne’s car to its second-ever win in 2012 at Texas Motor Speedway - a high-speed oval that the former F1 driver from Sheffield, England had adapted to rather quickly in his career.
“Once I met Justin Wilson I became his biggest salesman and supporter,” Davis told FOXSports.com. “The guy was just phenomenal. Once you work with guys like Justin and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , there are a few great drivers you work with in your career, you are spoiled. You are always looking for that next Justin Wilson and Scott Dixon.”
Wilson’s exploits on the track were impressive, but it was the man out of the cockpit that Davis wants the world to know more about.
“I was listening to a radio show in Pennsylvania and they came on to talk about ‘the driver who was killed on Sunday.’ To them, it was just a ‘driver’ but to me he was more than that.
“They were talking about a race car driver and not the man, Justin Wilson. He wasn’t just a race car driver, he was a husband, a father, a friend. You talk to teammates that raced with him in the past like !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and he was such a great mentor as a human being. Someone needs to tell that story. We knew how he was but the normal fan doesn’t know Justin Wilson very well and they need to understand the man behind the helmet and the uniform.”
He was a driver who could get in any race car and drive it, seemingly with no hope of victory.
“Who thought he would win races at Dale Coyne?” Davis asked. “I was at that time trying to hire mechanics and race car drivers and some mechanics would walk out the same day and say, ‘I can’t work in this environment.’ He came in there and was ready to win races. His desire to win races and the desire of the guys we put together we all knew if we could get him in our car we could win races.
“But he was an unbelievable father who could go home and be with his kids. He was a great human being.”
Davis also points out what Justin Wilson did with his younger brother, Stefan, who would go on to become an Indy Lights driver.
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“His brother played video games and did very little racing and one day he decided to be a race car driver and Justin said, ‘OK, I’ll teach you everything I know.’ And the kid ended up being pretty good,” Davis said.
Wilson had a driving style that allowed him to pass other cars. He was aggressive but rarely crashed. He could pass cars in places where others drivers couldn’t. When he got out of the car at the end of the race, he had done the very best he could do with that car.
“He was just magic,” Davis said.
As an engineer and team manager, Davis realized the damage the nose could do because it is designed to absorb impacts of 100 G-forces. The part is made by Dallara and is currently not tethered to the chassis.
“With that part in the air and Justin traveling 200 miles an hour, it’s quite heavy, and if it hits anything it’s going to destroy whatever it hits,” Davis explained. “It’s not a lightweight piece of bodywork. What are the odds of that happening - hitting a driver in the helmet?
“It’s been talked about even with the old car to tether that piece of the car, even with the older IndyCar. There had never been an impact where they thought it would come off like that. If there had been a prior incident on a speedway where the nose came off we would have probably tethered.”
Davis defends INDYCAR’s approach to safety and believes called what happened “freakish.”
“You can’t point fingers at anyone,” Davis said. “I know we will have a tether on it. It can be done and it will be done. We owe it to Justin. He was one of the biggest proponents to make the cars safer and give the fans something to see. He broke his back at Mid-Ohio in 2011 so there are now three inches of additional foam under a driver’s butt in the car.”
At 6-foot-3-1/2, Wilson was the tallest driver in the series. That was quite a handicap when he drove the older IndyCar in 2008.
“He didn’t fit in that car as well as some of the other drivers but her had a burning desire to go racing,” Davis said. “His legs hit the steering wheel. But in spite of that he wanted to race and he never complained.
“No complaints, ever.”
The FIA is considering canopies in open-cockpit cars, but those have yet to be properly tested. NASCAR and Sports Car racing both use Plexi-Glass windshields or windscreens with tear-offs but Davis believes optical distortion could be a real issue at 230 miles per hour.
“There are some ovals like at Texas where there is so much gravel and sand it blasts the car and the drivers do a good job with tear-offs but they need to test it,” Davis said. “We have to look at safety and keep the fans in the stands and do whatever it takes for this series to survive. Whatever it takes we have to do it and stay in the public eye whether it’s through our racing or safety innovations. We have to continue to develop a better, safer, faster IndyCar with innovations that keep people interested.”
As IndyCar mourns the loss of the driver and a friend, it must move on to this weekend’s season-finale at Sonoma Raceway that will crown the 2015 Verizon IndyCar Series champion.
The show must go on and that is so true in auto racing as the dark, ugly specter of death has made it unwelcome and totally unexpected visits too many times in the history of racing.
“Justin wants to know who is going to win the championship,” Davis said. “He understood the risks to this business. He walked in to Pocono last week and he was just smiling. Everybody he walked by in the paddock he walked and talked to and was smiling, happy that he was at Pocono. Justin was sitting back there late in the race biding his time waiting for the race to get down to 10 laps to go and then he was going to go.
“The worst thing that would happen is if INDYCAR said we can’t race because Justin Wilson got killed. That wouldn’t do him any justice.”
Davis wants to reach out to his friend, Pappas, and talk to him but he can’t.
“I can text him but I can’t talk to him,” Davis said as he broke down and cried. “I just can’t verbally do it. What we had with him you spend the rest of your career to get some kind of team together like we had in those races. Racing is a tough business with a lot of ups and downs with sponsors and funding. It’s tough to get the right group together to put the right package together.
“When you find it like we did with Justin you wanted to keep it.”
Today, Davis and others in the Verizon IndyCar Series cry over the loss of a great friend. In time, the memory of the people who Wilson touched will be cherished by everyone, including some of the sick children he visited last weekend in a hospital in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania.
RacinBob
> JEM
08/25/2015 at 18:58 |
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In 2011 I had the chance to be at “load in” day for the Mid Ohio Indycar weekend. That’s Thursday when the teams set up their cars and pits. It’s a great time to be there because it’s all crew and some drivers. If you ignored the support vehicles, you would think it was a regional race weekend.
The primary action was mechanics moving in cars and equipment. There were no big names in sight except in Justin’s garage. There he was with his mates, bleeding brakes.
Just another racer.
Cheers