Agustín Canapino will face his first competition on an oval this weekend, the one in Texas, an extremely demanding track among those with these characteristics, and one that contains many stories.
Texas Motor Speedway was opened in 1996 to host Nascar races, and over the years it became an Indy classic. The oval has witnessed spectacular or fatal accidents. In 2000 Tony Roper lost his life during a Craftsman Truck Series race in which Greg Biffle became champion. In 2003 Kenny Brack suffered a massive 214 G-force blow, and two years earlier Davey Hamilton nearly lost both feet after colliding with the guard rail during an Indy Racing League race.
In 2001 there was an event that marked the Cart division, at that time made up of the big teams, including Ganassi, Andretti and Penske. These monopostos had turbocharged engines, had less downforce and added to the 24° bank, made Texas the fastest track in the category, with record speeds of 233.447 mph (375.696 km/h).
The 2001 Texas competition could not be played, specifically it was suspended after the first trials. The reasons: the pilots became dizzy after a few laps at more than 370 kilometers / hour (on average), which led to a series of accidents. Paul Tracy scored an average of 381 km/h in one of the tests, where the cars came to cross the finish line at 390 km/h, extreme speeds that amazed everyone.
One of the pilots affected was Oriol Serviá. The Catalan remembers that “before I felt dizzy, on the track I could feel a huge G-force. I felt like I couldn’t react fast enough, for some reason the brain seemed to work slowly, it wasn’t able to adapt to this speed. Then we realized that the problem was not the speed itself, going 370 kilometers / hour, but that the brain lacked energy to react.
The drivers got out of the lost cars, disoriented when entering the pits, not knowing where they had to stop. The definitive alarm was the accidents of two former Formula 1 drivers, Mauricio Gugelmin and Cristiano da Matta. Gugelmin’s first impact involved a force of 66 G’s, and his second against the inside fence was nearly double that.
Steve Olvey, CART’s chief physician, said that in his 25 years as a doctor in the category, he had never seen such an unusual situation. So much so that during the night before the race, Olvey contacted Dr. Richard Jennings, former director of space flight for NASA and professor of aviation medicine at the University of Texas. Jennings made it clear to him that the human body cannot tolerate no more than 4 to 4.5 G’s without the pilot losing consciousness.
«The pilots are used to running with more than 4-5G, but for short periods of time, but in the case of Texas the loads were present for more than 80% of the lap and after ten laps the pilots began to experience symptoms such as dizziness, vertigo, disorientation, tunnel vision and that in the worst case could lead to loss of consciousness “. explained the doctor.
After the competition was not held, Texas Motor Speedway sued CART for damages and must pay compensation of more than five million dollars including payments for the 2002 and 2003 races that never took place. The series never returned to Texas Motor Speedway until it was absorbed into the IndyCar Series in 2008 after filing for bankruptcy for a second time late in the 2007 season.
