"The ALS people better look at that tape very closely and get their emergency personnel up to snuff!!"
Look, this was a practice for a sportscar race on a road course, not a Nascar race with a budget of many millions and safety trucks loaded with workers and equipment waiting to zoom out there at a moments notice. Those guys were corner workers, mostly there to do flagging and communicate with the race officials. They didn't have firesuits, they were wearing shorts and t-shirts, and were very likely volunteers. I would have been pretty hesitant to run into that fireball, too.
If the "pneumatiques" were cold, why wasn't Dale Jr informed of them?
Also, for media purposes, CBS did NOT produce this race at all or do anything. IMSA produced the race, hired the crew, and the entire race broadcast was under the authority of IMSA, not CBS. This broadcast was a "paid program" on CBS provided by IMSA. That IMSA crew feeds information to Speednews, and an IMSA official was the one who forgot the decimal.
Also if the fuel pump is electronic, the fuel pumps should have shut themselves off. That's common sense on a modern sportscar with electronics. A good race car fuel pump should shut itself off within seconds of the impact.
The corner workers come from the California region of the SCCA and they worked the Nextel Cup / AutoZone Elite Southwest / Trans-Am weekend last month. IMSA also has a rule similar to F1 where the only car allowed to pick up the driver is their "chase" car, a Porsche Cayenne.
Bruton will have some work to do with the track safety for 2005.
And yes, Johnny O'Connell and Ron Fellows won again at Infineon, so the team did "win one for Dale".
But the switch to Michelin for 2004 from Goodyear to please the ACO has been costly because of this one crash.