Anyone else go to this this weekend? Not a huge event by any means, and not even as big as last year, but there was still some neat stuff there.

Unfortunately, Dino Crescentini suffered a huge wreck in his '77 Wolf-Dallara Can-Am car Sunday morning around 10-10:15AM, which brought out the red flag and resulted in the cancellation of the rest of the weekend's races. The attached picture was taken over 3 hours after the wreck actually happened. The area from the vehicle and a couple hundred metres back down the straight was blocked off with caution tape and police were on the scene. Never a good sign, at all. At this point, nothing about Dino's condition has been released. I sure hope he's alright, but it does not look good.

A bit of googling reveals a lovely entry list but bad news

Quote from http://forums.corvetteforum.com/showthread.php?p=1565999104 :

Well, today was a wash.......during a late morning race, the front body work came off the Walter Wolf Can Am car, which then caused the driver to lose control and crash as he was cresting the hill on the back straight....he died at the scene....as a result, all the feature races were cancelled for the afternoon. At least he died doing something he loved. Freaks me out a bit, I talked briefly with him on Friday when I was taking pics of the car.

Ack.. The news I was expecting, but hoping not to hear.

[EDIT]
Driver Killed at Mosport
Tragedy Mars 2008 VARAC Festival at Mosport

The information is slightly incorrect (the events were canceled because of the Police presence and investigation on-scene) but it seems we now have confirmation.

RIP Dino Crescentini

Mosport's always been a really scary track.

Just looking at the stats... 16 people killed there since '61 apparently (I thought it opened in 64?). 5 of them have been since May of '01, which means the first 11 deaths were spread over almost 40 years, and the latter 5 over only 7 years. That's not good at all...

Yes, Mosport has always been a scary place. It's one of the reasons I like it so much; it's such a driver's track, and it takes balls to be fast there. I wish there were more circuits like it still in existence.

Quote from MAGGOT :

Just looking at the stats... 16 people killed there since '61 apparently (I thought it opened in 64?). 5 of them have been since May of '01, which means the first 11 deaths were spread over almost 40 years, and the latter 5 over only 7 years. That's not good at all...

It seems like a worrying trend, if you look on Motorsport Memorials there are very few fatalities in the '90s at a lot of circuits and a sudden increase in the last few years, I think largely due to a false sense of security.

I think the problem is the linearity of racing safety thinking. New safety developments seem to be designed for specific types of incidents, often making other (often less frequent) types of incidents worse.

Quote from ajp71 :

...I think largely due to a false sense of security.

And I think even just from having more motorsports activity in general.

Sad to hear it.