Posted on 08/10/2014 5:04:09 AM PDT by CaptainK
NASCAR star Tony Stewart hit and killed another driver who was walking on the track in a sprint car race on Saturday night.
The other driver, Kevin Ward Jr., had collided with Stewart on the previous lap, leaving Ward’s car with a flat tire and pushed into the wall. As officials threw a caution, Ward left his car and began walking down the track — gesturing angrily toward Stewart — before being clipped and dragged 50 feet by Stewart’s car.
Several spectators told Bob Pockrass of The Sporting News that Stewart appeared to throttle his car before colliding with Ward.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
The have done that.
In fact for all kinds of reasons, you think the track would have had at least have 4 or 5 cameras going, angled for each portion of the track itself.
I did not call you a name...
I said you were ignorant.
And that has not changed a bit.
It’s not a big track, and there were not many there watching the race, it appears..
If it was a track like Eudora, there would have been more people and media there.
Tony does this stuff, not to compete regularly, but because he loves to drive and he brings fans to these various small tracks to keep the tracks in business and the sport alive.
Neither He, or other driver that I know, or have ever known in the history of racing, would intentionally strike someone with their car, much less kill them. Sling some dirt on them, sure, why not.
There have been a number of incidents where two cars collide, and fists collide afterward, but not what some are accusing Tony of. That is totally ridiculous. What happened here was a accident caused by visibility and a purposeful act by the victim.
You can’t stop these cars on a dime, so you use the engine to slow them and that combined with the slow speeds at the time, made the situation worse as the car needs speed and room to maneuver.
The idea that Tony intentionally sped up to hit the guy with more force is total nonsense. If he did anything, it would have been to attempt to spin the car down into the infield or at least low enough to avoid the impact.
The view from the video does not show you the depth and positioning of the cars nor the obstructions to visibility. I have to fill that in from my experience.
The exact moves that were made by Tony just prior to impact are also difficult to ascertain because the move was never completed and only began some 20 feet from the impact.
For this reason, I don’t think he saw him or anticipated that he would be there, much less remain there. I will have to leave it up to Tony to explain what he saw, when he saw it and what he tried to do before the impact.
What I do know is that the death was certainly avoidable and it should not have happened. Nobody would expect that. The rule is that unless your car is on fire, you stay in it until the safety car is there.
But having said that, the accusations I see today on this forum are in keeping with the general social deterioration I see everywhere.
Everywhere......
I’m saying that there are people who are completely exonerating Stewart and those who are hanging him. And there’s still an investigation going on.
Was Kevin Ward stupid to jump onto the track? Yes. But it’s happened before in racing. Was Tony Stewart responsible for controlling his race car? Yes. But he’s run onto the track himself before.
So let’s see what the investigation shows.
I too do not think he intended to kill the victim...
But due to all the circumstances, his history, etc., it certainly does not look good for his career.
His history is way overplayed..
It’s part of the Nascar mystique, but it does not extend to striking someone with a car.
calling someone ignorant IS calling them a name. But then it seems you are too ignorant to realize that.
Furthermore, your view that Stewart COULDN'T POSSIBLY have done this on purpose, In light of the evidence on the video(speeding up and veering) in light of his prior violent behavior and in spite of having said he wanted to run another driver over 2 years ago. Well THAT is a level of ignorance I haven't seen since the OJ simpson jury. You should be ashamed.
He may well have wanted to hit him. People kill other people all the time in impulsive acts of anger. The jails are full of them.
I do, however, think it's more likely he wanted to scare Ward by getting close to him, or tried to spray mud on him. but without reading his mind, There's no way to know which, if any of it, it is.
He has wrecked plenty of drivers on purpose. Only TS knows for sure right now but I would bet the house that Tony was trying to be clever and scare the kid.
Too bad he did not apply all his skills and knowledge from all those years racing with the pros sat night when the caution came out.
Has anyone mentioned a lie detector test?
I’ll take 1 or 2 if they are XL or XXL
Who is the hotdog man? Is that a codeword for one of the drivers or literally a hot dog vendor was trying to cross the track during a race? What was he thinking?
He was a vendor. Don’t know what possessed him. I wouldn’t want to have seen it, that much I know.
I want to add a few things to your post as I would think Tony Stewart was aware he knocked that kid’s car out of the race, so by the next lap when the yellow flag came out he’d be sheepishly driving by even more slowly than other drivers knowing the guilt he faced by doing what he did. Strangely, as the very driver you knocked out of the race is coming towards you, you have to be able to see this happening at a distance. Also why didn’t he slow down? He already did a lap from when he hit the car and the yellow flag was immediately flown, you’d think he’d be doing 20mph by the next lap instead of what speed he was doing which looked considerably more than 20.
...with a yellow flag though which means caution. You’re making it sound like the victim was strolling on a race track during the race with the green flag with the drivers driving at top speed. The drivers should have been slowing down not revving the throttle during a yellow caution flag. Stewart is done, finished finito!
Are you making excuses for Tony Stewart? The little I know of him he seems like a jerk wad.
lol yeah from what I’ve heard he isn’t well liked. He’s pretty competitive, passionate and pushes pretty hard.
He’s the boss of a company and he likes to win. Pretty easy to see why some people might get offended.
None of that makes him guilty of murder or manslaughter. Most especially based on a sketchy video of him hitting a guy running down the racetrack at him.
Stewart was slowing down, that much is obvious.
Go play on the highway, jump in front of a car and see what happens.
Are you not getting the fact there was a yellow caution flag at the time he killed the kid? He had to have seen the kid from a distance so why didn’t he 1)stop the car, 2) run the car off the track, 3) swerve far enough to avoid him instead of killing him? A car can outmaneuver a pedestrian 8 days a week, even if said pedestrian was walking towards the car.
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