It occurred to me that this type of crash is the cause of the great majority of fatal accidents in racing today. In the last couple of years, I believe there has been at least one fatality per season in each of NASCAR, IRL, and CART, and all those I know of were the result of hitting a concrete outside wall at high speed.

The problem is the concrete, which for practical purposes has absolutely no capacity to absorb energy. The car stops instantly, and no one knows how to build a car that can protect the driver against that kind of impact. Imagine this: instead of a solid concrete wall, a relatively thin, breakaway steel barrier, backed up by 5 feet of sand-filled barrels, and that backed up by concrete. Obviously, retrofitting all of the high-speed tracks in that way would be a very expensive process, but I think it would save lives, a few every year, and you can't really put a price on that.

I know I never again want to see anything like what I saw today. Racing does not have to be deadly to be fun.