When Things Go Wrong Big Time

There were a couple of photos in the news yesterday that I thought pretty interesting. The first is from the Busch race at Fontana last night. Brad Kezelowski was minding his own business going into turn one at 190 mph when he was clipped from behind, turned dead right and smacked head-on into the turn one wall (images from RacingOne):


A moment later the car looked like this:

Fortunately, the fire went out on its own when the car stopped sliding. The telemetry said the car was still going about 140 when it hit the fence. I was watching the race on TiVO and couldn't believe the violence of the impact. In hundreds of NASCAR races I've watched, it's easily the hardest wreck I've ever seen in which the driver got out alive. He was banged up a bit, and may have a leg injury, but was awake and alert when the safety crews got him out of the car. Hats off to NASCAR and the safety engineers who have done an amazing job making racing safer.

The pilots of two stunt planes at a Polish air show weren't so lucky. The cloud of debris is what's left of two airplanes that tried to occupy the same point in space at the same time:

The third plane in the left of the photo managed to miss the mess.

Finally, there's this:


Appalachian State 34, #5 Michigan 32. Ouch.