once you got going past 228, people were coming in and not knowing what they were doing. There was the ongoing threat of, are we going too fast here for the body and the brain?

Inside CART’s 2001 Texas debacle: The invisible monster

Lesley Ann Miller/Motorsport Images
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emailBy Marshall Pruett | May 1, 2021 11:27 AM



Brack, the first CART driver to test at TMS, earned pole position with a 233.447mph performance. Patrick Carpentier, illness notwithstanding, was able to muster enough speed to start second with a 233.345mph blast. And Oriol Servia, driving for the small, upstart Sigma Autosport outfit, was a surprising third at 232.978mph.

All totaled, 21 of the 25 drivers registered laps above 228mph during their short qualifying runs, which soon became a number that was an important piece of the puzzle.

Wally Dallenbach: The threshold that was created at that racetrack with the banking was about 228mph. And up until that speed, it seemed like you could deal with the Gs, but once you got going past 228, people were coming in and not knowing what they were doing. There was the ongoing threat of, are we going too fast here for the body and the brain?

I got together with our doctors and they concluded that this was happening and that the only way to prevent something like was to either slow the cars down, or to wear G suits, and I said we’re not going to do that. But they explained that apparently in the medical terms, blood was running away from the brain in this situation — it was typical of what happens to jet fighters, and that’s why they wear the G suits.
CART Medical Director Dr. Steven Olvey shows a chart with a driver’s G-force loading data, illustrating the unusual loads being placed on the drivers at TMS. Michael Levitt/Motorsport Images

Helio Castroneves: First of all, our cars back then, we’re talking about 900 horsepower, right? There was no playing around. When you leave the pits, those cars are so strong that you’re afraid to touch the throttle. And a place like Texas with huge banking… back then, it wasn’t very common to be on huge banking. So we go out, as soon as you get to the banking and you start pushing the throttle a little bit more, a little bit more, little bit more, and things are happening so fast that you don’t know what’s happening.

All of a sudden, you’re just the passenger when you first go flat-out. You’re like, holy crap. And there it was — we were doing 230, 235 with the draft. Then we start getting confident, comfortable for that top speed. So you start taking wing out to go faster. And that’s where the scary part was. You start taking downforce out of the car, and you don’t feel anything. It was absolutely stuck. It is just going faster, faster. You’re like, “Oh man, this is tough. This is really tough.”

Tom German: race engineer, Gil de Ferran, Team Penske: There’s three key points. There’s the sustained G loading through the corner. I spent some time on this after the race, reading some of the flight research papers to understand what tests have been done on what fighter pilots do, and what actual data is available on the physical side of this problem.

In a fighter jet, when they talk about the high G loadings, they’re almost exclusively talking about vertical Gs relative to the body. It’s pulling blood from your brain, down your torso into your legs. So the G suits squeeze your legs, squeeze your torso; all those things are to counteract that migration of blood down out of your brain. And the G loading at Texas is a combination of lateral G loading and vertical G loading. That’s the real problem. Nine Gs in an airplane, the fighter pilots see it for a couple seconds, and then they’re fine. But they never see it for a couple minutes.

So the first key point is the sustained G loadings through the corners. And perhaps the more important one that gets largely overlooked was the recovery time. At Texas, you have very short recovery times. You’re going so fast on the straightaways, loaded up through the corners, you release a little bit down the backstraight, loaded again, the front straight still has a decent amount of G loading on as you’re going around there. Your body really doesn’t get the chance to recover. So the length of a run becomes a significant factor here.

And if you took some of these research graphs on pilots, they have a chart of “Gs versus time,” and there’s a shape to the curve of what’s acceptable and what’s not. The chart shows how the body can take super-high G loads if it’s sustained for a very short period of time. But as your “time sustained” goes up, the body’s G threshold comes down dramatically. And so that, combined with not being able to recover, is what we were seeing in Texas. It was everything the research papers said you should not be doing to the human body.

The culprit had been found. And it was unlike anything TMS or select CART officials expected.

Thrust into an emergency, and with a race to run in front of 60,000 fans in 24 hours, clowns and heroes would begin to emerge behind closed doors as the Saturday evening sun fell behind the grandstands.