The Indianapolis Motor Speedway was rocked by a dramatic crash during qualifying on Saturday when veteran driver Sebastien Bourdais hit the wall hard.
The French pilot was evacuated, apparently still conscious, to the nearby Indiana University Health Methodist Hospital where he was scheduled to undergoing surgery Saturday evening for a fractured pelvis and right hip.
Bourdais lost control of his No. 18 Honda in turn 2 on the third lap of his qualifying run, hitting the barrier. The car flipped over and back onto its wheels again, briefly engulfed in a ball of fire. The crash occurred after Bourdais set the fastest laps of the day, reaching speeds in excess of 231 miles per hour and lapping the Brickyard in the 38-second range. The next fastest drivers were clocked in the 230-mph range with lap times in the 39s.
The incident, which occurred after the qualifying session had been postponed due to weather, is being described as the worst crash since Gordon Smiley’s fatal 1982 qualifying accident. The SAFER barrier system installed in 2002 could very well have saved Bourdais’ life.
Though he’s never won the Indy 500, Bourdais is a highly regarded entity in American open-wheel racing, having won the Champ Car title four years running between 2004 and 2007. He briefly drove for Scuderia Toro Rosso in F1, achieving two seventh-place finishes in 2008 and landed in eighth place twice the year after before being cut. Since returning to the reunified IndyCar Series in 2011, he’s won five races (mostly on the strength of his road-course and street-circuit skills), and won the 24 Hours of Daytona in a Corvette in 2014.
While it seems unlikely that Bourdais will recover in time for Indy this year, AutoWeek reports that his Dale Coyne Racing team could still find another driver and prepare another chassis (if this one can’t be fixed). The team could rush to pick up Stefan Wilson, who vacated his seat at Andretti Autosport to make room for Fernando Alonso. Stefan’s late brother Justin gave the Coyne team its first win at Watkins Glen in 2009, six years before the crash that killed him at Pocono in 2015.
If the team manages to get the entry back on the grid, it will have to start from scratch as Bourdais technically failed to complete his four-lap qualifying run. With his times discounted, Ed Carpenter (who has twice before taken pole for the Indy 500) topped Saturday’s time sheet. Fernando Alonso landed seventh, but crucially within the top nine that will shoot out again for the first three rows on the starting grid. Joining Carpenter and Alonso for the shootout will be Takuma Sato, Scott Dixon, JR Hildebrand, Alexander Rossi, Will Power, Tony Kanaan, and Marco Andretti.