power i guess power is pretty banged up.......broken back.....bad crash...just think...this would have been fatal 15 years ago!

http://indycar.neulion.com/indy/cons...atid=11&id=548

Power has two crushed vertebrae and a concussion, Phillipe has a broken foot and a concussion...especially sad for Power considering the way he and Penske had been running this year...

for sure!

Nelson Philippe
http://twitpic.com/eylva

http://twitpic.com/f04yl

I would have bet anything it would have been his right foot. Guess he was standing hard on the brake the whole time. Should have let it slide off track. Bad wreck.

Vitor Meira crushed two vertebrae in a similar head-on crash at Indy this year...I don't know how it happens, but there is something specific causing this to happen. I'm not saying these cars are unsafe though...it's true that these kind of accidents would have probably paralyzed or killed these drivers 15-20 years ago...improvements have definitely been made. As a huge Vitor Meira fan, who saw that accident in person, I'm very proud to say that Vitor will probably be back driving again either next week in Joliet or at Motegi after that!

Vitor is very smooth driver and that is what it takes at indy. I was in turn 1 and saw his crash, from what I saw ,it could have been a whole lot worse as far as his injuries go.

the way that the seats are designed........during a head on crash the bottom of the back is being driven into the seat, causing these "crushing" injuries.....it is compressing the spine so much that the vertebrae are just being powdered..not much they can do about this, except change the angle that the driver sits. that would be hard to do without changing the "indy" part of the indycar.

Without knowing more about their exact injuries, my hunch is they had compression fractures of the verterbrae...it is very hard to keep the upper body perfectly aligned in a crash, given the pelvis is anchored pretty solidly and the upper body wants to be pushed out of the shoulder harnesses (that also stretch)...lots of flexing and bending goes on that our bodies are just not meant to do to that extreme...improvements have been made and continue to be made concerning seats and restraints...hard to imagine the forces involved...anyone heard any G-force measurements?

I see past cart fans and Robin Miller say that the cars look painfully slow on a rc. All I'm going to say is I would hate to see the outcome of a situation like this if they were going any faster.