Here’s a post from a guy who was there in the section with his dad.
Y’all know I watch a lot of racing, like an obsessive amount since the mid-90s and when I saw that wheel break the tether it’s all I could see, it was like slow motion as I watched it on the corner of the screen as it cleared the fence, and I’m thinking “oh no!!!!!!” And then the camera shot cut away and made it hard to tell what happened.
I was watching the CART race when the wheel cleared the fence and killed three fans at Michigan - which led to the modern tethers that we now use. I was also watching the race that took Greg Moore and I saw Dale Earnhardt die. A race car driver’s death is tragic and alters the arc of the sport forever - but that risk is integral to their choice to drive race cars, everyone knows it’s part of the deal. But fans dying at the race track is just beyond tragic and presents existential crisis. Fans make the sport and it’s simply unacceptable that they would die at the track.
We were very lucky today. Good God that was so close to being so bad. And the engineers will study this incident and build in additional redundancy on the tether - so to get a chance to improve without having to suffer the loss is another blessing.
I’m still seeing it my mind as clear as day.