The 90th 24 Hours of LeMans this weekend

[PC Engine Fan X!]

For those die-hard racing fans, it's the 90th running of the 24 Hours of LeMans this weekend. The only American racing team racing in this prestigious event is headed by racer/actor Patrick Dempsey. It's being broadcast live today & tomorrow on the Speed Channel stateside and a full 24 hours of live streaming footage on the Speed.com site as well.

It's always cool to watch the night time racing with all the cool electroluminescent panels on the sides of the various cars to denote which place they're ranked at.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[TransatlanticFoe]

Overshadowed within 10 minutes by the death of Allan Simonsen

Motor sport needs to wake up. How many times has it taken someone to die before that happens? People don't ought to be dying in sports car racing these days.

[Ruldra]

Motorsports is an inherently dangerous sport. We've gone a long way since the days of Senna's death in terms of safety, but even with all precautions shit will happen eventually.

From the replays it looked like a very simple accident. Drivers have walked away unscathed from far worse crashes, and yet this one claims a life. Deaths are random like that.

[1up]

Yes, Allans death was a real surprise to me. When watching from the incar footage from the corvette driving right behind him, it was when they were powering out of the turn. He got onto the blue and spun the car into the barrier. Didn't look that serious at all? They said he was concious and talked to the medical staff but died later from internal injuries

I remember Ralph Schumacher blowing a tire on that banked circuit in America and rear ended the wall with 250km/h and walked away. Guess it was horrible luck? The Dale Earnhart crash didn't look that serious either and he was also fataly injured and passed away.

[lilmanjs]

They need to do something about safety at the track, and figure out a way that a normal simple backed the car into the wall crash doesn't take over an hour to fix. Too many cautions in this year's race, but some awesome racing when it was green. Watched from the 73 corvette(speedtv's streaming crap was broken at the time) and got to see an awesome overtake of a porsche and Viper at the same time. Here's to hoping next year nobody dies.

[1up]

They did set some records this year. Longest green flag period. Most safetycar periods (10). Least number of DNFs.

I Think they said that the combined time of the safetycar periods was 5 hours