SOMETIMES life gives you a reminder that things might not all be as rosy as they may seem on the surface. 

And when it comes to sport, Motor racing has a very good knack of making sure you get pegged down a level just when you think things are going swimmingly.

Don’t be mistaken, the sport has a lot going for it at the moment.

There’s an increasingly competitive Supercars title battle between the Shell V-Power Fords and the Red Bull Holden team, the ever-building intensity in the Formula 1 title fight between Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton and the incredible Alonso-to-Indy story that has captivated so many over the last month or so.

And then comes a day like yesterday, Sunday May 21, that reminds you on several levels that the sport can bite and that we need to remember that.

Its almost as if the sport has an in-built defence mechanism to remind us all that, at its core, it remains dangerous, challenging and unpredictable.

Close to home there was the massive crash in the Touring Car Masters race on Sunday morning.

It was an enormous pile-up, that left a wreck of tangled metal and broken cars strewn across the Winton tarmac.

I’ve called the series for seven years now and it was by far and away the worst crash I’ve seen for the classic muscle cars.

What’s more it left several drivers nursing bad bruising and sent Adelaide driver Bernie Stack to a nearby hospital with pain in his neck and back.

Bernie is one of the sport’s nice guys, a quietly spoken individual who loves his Porsches and the camaraderie around the paddock. He’s been around a long time, is liked by many and has always tolerated the many obvious jokes about his chosen vocation and his surname with a wry smile.

He’s the last person you’d expect to see sent to hospital.

And then there’s Jason Gomerall, a self-made businessman who has invested a lot of his own time and money into not only his own racing career, but that of funding young-gun Todd Hazelwood’s in Supercar racing.

Jason is a guy who’s vastly improved his driving in recent years and on Saturday at Winton he out-qualified John Bowe (a two-time Bathurst winning, Touring Car Champion) on raw speed and grabbed his first ever pole position.

Understandably, Jason was fairly excited with that result.

So when his big moment in the sunshine came, a chance to start from pole alongside one of the greats of the sport, he would have hoped that it resulted in more than 500 meters of competition.

And, as a result of a spin in front of the field as he exited turn two on the opening lap, a wrecked car and a smashed up field.

Just when you’re up and about, this sport can peg you down right to the lowest possible level you’d think you can achieve.

It was absolutely a case of ‘That’s Motor Racing’.

The Supercars crash at Symmons Plains is another example of that.. a particularly violent and hugely expensive example for a lot of teams and drivers.

On the other side of the Pacific, buried in the heartland of America’s mid-west, a similar story was unfolding for four-time Champ Car champion Sebastien Bourdais in practice for the Indy 500.

The Frenchman had rocketed to the lead of the IndyCar championship earlier this year and had carried strong form throughout the opening week of practice at the Speedway, where he and the always under-funded but smartly-operated Dayle Coyne Racing team had been one of the fastest cars.

And as he tipped into turn two at 227 MPH on Sunday morning Australian time, on the third of his four-lap run to qualify for the Greatest Spectacle of Racing, he was the fastest of the cars to run and a spot towards the front of the grid was beckoning.

Then the rear of his Dallara-Honda chassis snapped sideways without warning, and though the Frenchman was able to almost instantaneously catch the slide the car still fired into the outside wall with near undiminished velocity.

Reports afterwards suggested it was an impact recorded at 100G.

Thus, one of the best guys in IndyCar racing will spend the next period of time in an Indianapolis hospital having the multiple fractures to his pelvis and a fractured right hip patched up. He’ll be lucky to race in the next three months, let alone get on the grid for the 101st running of the ‘500 next weekend.

Now, Bernie Stack might spend a few days in Hospital and Jason Gomersall’s Torana is run by a team who will be able to fix it before the next round.

The excellent doctors will patch Sebastien Bourdais back together and he’ll recover to race again, as quickly and competitively as he always has I’m sure.

And Dale Coyne will unquestionably be able to find someone for a re-built IndyCar to take the start in the Indy 500 next week.

In the grand scheme of things, Sunday wasn’t that bad a day. It wasn’t Imola in 1994, fortunately, and it wasn’t even Symmons Plains on a sopping, wet Saturday a month or so ago. And that’s a very good thing indeed.

But it was a reminder how important it is that we continue to not take the sport lightly and remember there’s the potential for things to happen we might not like.

As it says on the back of the ticket, ‘Motor Racing is Dangerous’.

And one moment you can be on top of the world on pole, and the next you can be staring at a wrecked race car.

The best thing is that we still keep going, despite these bumps in the road, and it continues to be the compelling, dramatic, exciting and energising sport that we all love.

And thank goodness for that.

WORDS & IMAGES: Richard Craill