11 33 77 | Dan Wheldon's IndyCar Death of October 16, 2011

At the IZOD IndyCar World Championship, Dan Wheldon lost his life on the eleventh lap.  He was 33-years old and was racing car #77.  The wreck he was involved in, was like no other in the history of IndyCar.

“I’ll tell you, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Ryan Briscoe said of the crash that stunned even veteran drivers and racing fans. “The debris we all had to drive through the lap later, it looked like a war scene from ‘Terminator’ or something. I mean, there were just pieces of metal and car on fire in the middle of the track with no car attached to it and just debris everywhere. So it was scary, and your first thoughts are hoping that no one is hurt because there’s just stuff everywhere. Crazy.”   

• Terminator = 20+5+18+13+9+14+1+20+15+18 = 133

The pileup was so massive and the smoke so thick that the chain of events wasn’t entirely clear, but the reaction seemed to start when Wade Cunningham swerved and J.R.Hildebrand drove over the left rear portion of Cunningham’s car. Hildebrand’s car flew into the air and Cunningham hit the wall, with trailing cars slowing down and piling up. As Paul Tracy was slowing down, Wheldon appeared to drive over his car, went airborne and struck the fence at the worst possible angle.

“One minute you’re joking around at driver intros and the next, Dan’s gone,” said Dario Franchitti, a long-time friend of Wheldon’s. “I lost, we lost, a good friend. Everybody in the IndyCar series considered him a friend. He was such a good guy. He was a charmer.”
In his blog, Wheldon had said Saturday that his crew was seeking to find speed that had been missing for a while. “It is incredibly frustrating, both for me and them,” he said. “All the boys are working as hard as possible, but so far we haven't pinpointed what it is. Part of the reason it's so frustrating is because we'd created so much momentum around Indy.” 

Speeds during practice for the 200-lap race were close to 225 mph and there were concerns about overly aggressive moves. “We all had a bad feeling about this place in particular just because of the high banking and how easy it was to go flat,” Oriol Servia said. “And if you give us the opportunity, we are drivers and we try to go to the front. We race each other hard because that’s what we do. We knew it could happen, but it’s just really sad.”

• Oriol = 6+9+9+6+3 = 33
• Servia = 1+5+9+4+9+1 = 29, reduces to 11