Grim reminder

Maybe you missed it Sunday, it being Sunday and this being IndyCar, which vanishes off America's radar once May is over. But the boys were at treacherous old Pocono, Alexander Rossi won his second straight race, and ...

And this happened.

Seven laps in. Tore a huge hole in the fencing. Red-flagged the race for a good space of time.

And on Monday, Robert Wickens, the sensational rookie who tore out that fencing in a crash frighteningly similar to the one that killed Dan Wheldon in Las Vegas seven years ago, underwent spinal surgery.  In addition, he suffered injuries to his lower extremities, right arm and had a pulmonary contusion, which is essentially a bruised lung. So if he is lucky to be alive, that luck came with some extremely weighty qualifiers.

In total, it was a grim reminder that this remains a dangerous pursuit for those who pursue it, and unrelieved disaster is never more than a twitch away. On Sunday, Ryan Hunter-Reay and Robert Wickens both twitched at the same time at 220 mph, and Wickens paid the price. That price is always out there, and it's always weighted toward the terrible. Sometimes, in an era when safety innovations have lulled us into thinking racing is no longer the hard gamble it was, we tend to forget that.

The terrible is always out there, however. True, this is not the 1950s, when drivers died in such appalling numbers 13 of the 33 starters in the 1955 Indianapolis 500 eventually were killed driving race cars, and the politicians called it blood sport and howled for its banishment. And it's not the 1960s, when more men died and the first rear-engine cars were essentially bathtubs of gasoline with really huge tires. How anyone survived those years is far more a wonder than how those who died did so.

Still ...

Still, the men who strap into today's sleek rocket ships are as fully understanding of the risks involved as those who came before them. Because sometimes a Dan Wheldon or a Justin Wilson still happens. And sometimes a Robert Wickens still happens, which is certainly terrible enough.

Something they're all thinking about this week, no doubt. Even more so than usual.