Can I just say that every race track should have a catch fence and there’s no excuse for a car to jump the track, let alone get into the stands, if owners actually give a damn about fans?
Can I also say that it took many tracks waaaayyyy too long to install catch fences in the first place? Like, that’s an innovation that should have been around in the 60′s or 70′s. And yet you see sprint car races into the 90′s, on the quarter-miles, getting up into the stands and crushing fans.
It’s inexcusably negligent. All tracks should have catch fences. All rally courses and street courses should have concrete retainers or something more than tire barriers fans stand directly behind. And all tracks over a quarter mile should have the safety foam barriers.
(If you’re curious, I follow a youtube channel that posts clips from old shockumentaries and those “most shocking” true life clip shows, as well as things like old news footage of disasters and police chases, and he posted a bunch of the tamer stuff from Traces of Death today. You know, the stuff that either isn’t excessively gory or the video is too low-quality to make things out clearly that you can get away with putting up, and of course all age-restricted so the kids can’t find it. And there were some racing wrecks of course. Including, you guessed it, dudes jumping the track far too recently for that to have been a thing. And shit like that doesn’t shock me like some of the stuff they put up today. It doesn’t make me sad. It just makes my blood boil because that’s a failure that shouldn’t happen. If a car gets airborne, that’s just a thing that happens sometimes in racing wrecks. When it lands in the stands though, that’s not just something that happens. That’s the track owners not giving a shit!)