Stéphane Ortelli crash Le Mans series Monza.

The tax man

Was just watching the highlights of the race on Eurosport. Clip below for those that didn't catch it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNkySVNNpog

Luckily Ortelli only suffered a broken ankle and McNish in the Audi,how many lives does that man have.Suzuka 2002..lucky.Will never forget his crash at Donnington 1990,sadly a marshal wasn't as lucky that day. You could only imagine the scene if he was collected by Ortellis' car.

Quote from Autoblog.com

Motorsport is a game of inches and tenths. A few inches here and a few tenths of a second there can mean the difference between spectacle and tragedy. Case in point: Team ORECA driver Stephane Ortelli's horrifying crash during today's Le Mans Series race at Monza. Ortelli, driving the ORECA Courage LC70-Judd, lost control of the car, which spun off the pavement and onto the grass. The prototype then became airborne, barely missing Allan McNish in the Audi R10 TDI. And then things got really ugly. The Courage touched back down and went into a series of cartwheels, shedding bodywork all over the place before crashing into the wall and landing right-side up. Ortelli suffered a broken ankle, but Team ORECA reports he is otherwise in good health. As you'll see in the video, things could have been a whole lot worse. You know. A few inches here, a few tenths there...

We wish him a speedy recovery.

Timmaay

Wow, what a lucky fooker! I'd accept just a broken ankle anyday after a cartwheeling as such. It really does show how strong prototypes are, they are basically a single seater with lots of extra bodywork that help shed energy during a crash.

oneofakind32

you never really see F1 cars take off like that, at least no anymore. Could this not be avoidable by introducing some aero-dynamic restrictions to the car designs? or even requiring the car to be a minimum weight?

aidan_dunne

For sure, both Ortelli and the Audi driver there were extremely lucky. It doesn't bear thinking about what would have happened if they had actually collided! :eek:

oneofakind32, I'm not sure whether you were aware of this or not, but the cars do have minimum weight requirements, just like any other racing category. 900kg for the LMP1 cars and 825kg for the LMP2 cars, for example. However, I think the problem with sportscars flying through the air like this more than you'd see with an F1 car is the fact that they are just so much bigger that there's a lot more surface area under the cars for the air to catch when it gets under them and, with all that extra surface area/trapped air, these types of cars have more of a tendancy to get airborne. Plus, the aerodynamics on these cars probably wouldn't be as advanced as you'd find on an F1 car, where each and every single aero piece is designed to channel air in a certain way and, therefore, less likely to cause "lifting" like that.

As the years have gone by and the aerodynamics on these kinds of cars have also advanced, incidents of these sportscars getting airborne are becoming less and less common, just as we have seen with F1, but due to their bigger size and surface area they will always be more likely to take off.

Who can forget, for example, Le Mans back in 1999 when Mercedes had a whole spate of these incidents over the weekend, even after they added extra winglets to try and create more downforce and keep the cars on the road. I'll never forget watching this live on the telly and being horrified. I was sure Dumbreck was a goner. Lucky for him the trees had been cut back some time before! :eek:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQbgSe9S54I

Sabre0001

Saw that earlier...Crazy crash!!! Amazing the safety structures though.

The tax man

aidan_dunne wrote: »

Who can forget, for example, Le Mans back in 1999 when Mercedes had a whole spate of these incidents over the weekend, even after they added extra winglets to try and create more downforce and keep the cars on the road. I'll never forget watching this live on the telly and being horrified. I was sure Dumbreck was a goner. Lucky for him the trees had been cut back some time before! :eek:

That certainly was one of those crazy weekends for motorsport. Watched it live myself and had seen the footage of the sister car doing the same,it was just unreal to see it happen again.God only knows how he survived.