A deadly lack of experience?
Dana had been in just 3 IRL races
The scarred, twisted remains of Paul Dana's No. 17 Panoz race car lay under a tarp yesterday at Homestead-Miami Speedway, the biggest clue in a mystery that may never be solved.
Dana died Sunday after sustaining what officials described as ''multiple trauma injuries" in a two-car crash during a warmup for the season-opening IRL IndyCar Series race at Homestead.
The league plans to look into the possible causes, but the only thing the computers in Dana's car -- or the videotape of the crash -- is likely to tell them is that the 30-year-old rookie driver, with all of three IRL races under his belt, kept his foot on the gas until a few tenths of a second before impact.
As for why, well -- the only person who could likely have answered that question was Dana himself.
Ed Carpenter's spinning car, which had crashed seconds earlier and glanced off a concrete wall, had nearly come to a halt when Dana suddenly appeared, flying off turn two on the 1.5-mile oval.
It appeared Dana never slowed, bearing down like a 200-mile-per-hour missile. Two hours later, Dana was pronounced dead.
The wreck left everyone wondering whether he saw the caution lights flashing along the speedway walls, or heard the words of his spotter, who team officials say tried to warn of the danger ahead.
For years, drivers with little experience have managed to find rides at the top level of open-wheel racing by bringing family money or a sponsor to the table. And in a sport where big dollar sponsors are few and far between these days, buying a ride has become just another part of the game.
Dana wasn't rich, but he found a way to live his dream of racing cars. He worked at a variety of jobs, including mechanic, racing instructor, and marketing representative to pay his way up the racing ladder.
He even wrote about auto racing for several national magazines, including Autoweek and Sports Illustrated.
But Dana, a savvy and glib young man who didn't get serious about racing until he was 20, had found sponsorship in Team Ethanol that he could bring to a team. That's how he got his ride with Rahal Letterman Racing, one of the top teams in the IRL.
He did have some success in the Indy Pro Series, the steppingstone series to IndyCar, winning one pole and one race and finishing second in the championship in 2004. But anybody in open-wheel racing will tell you it's a big step up from Indy Pro to IndyCar.
Was he over his head in that race car? Why didn't he slow down? We'll probably never know the answer to either question.
