Haven't seen it yet, but I'm guessing that a guy named Spies or Mladin won. Getting ready to watch day 2 in about 40 minutes.

 

Wow! I just read your link. Back in '84 a similar series of crashes happened at Riverside Raceway in California. Nine guys went down in turn 9, right in front of me and my buddies, before the red flag came out.

Everyone in the stands was yelling "RED FLAG" at the corner workers, who were watching it all with their thumbs up their #@%%&*.

 

Sorry, but I can't help myself. I saw the replay the oil crash, but then someone dumped water from a cooler onto the track from the bridge to the infield causing 2 more riders to go down hard.

I hope they found those idiots and

 

Some comment about the flaggies:

If the US domestic race rules/regs are at all like the international ones (and they were last time I raced there), red flag is a race-control-only decision.

Corner marshals should wave the yellow very vigorously when they see an incident like this (ie riders must slow right down and not pass anyone), but because red means "stop right now" the deployment of that flag has a bunch of safety considerations of its own that are wider than just the one corner. (In some places the red held out but not waved means "go back to pits/start line".)

I've been in most of these situations: as rider coming up on a bad crash, as clerk of the course making the decisions to stop races, and as flag marshal. In my experience, and having seen the further crashing that it can cause, I think that riders or flag marshals deciding by themselves to deploy the red flag can create more problems than they solve.

 

In a situation like this with oil all over the track, something has to be done quickly. In the situation at Riverside in '84, the corner worker was watching everyone go down, one after the other, and he hadn't reached for ANY color flag.

 

Couldn't agree more. But it's a yellow flag, waved like the end of the earth has arrived, needed immediately.

 

+1 That would work. Just do something.

 

waving yellow flag only means no passing and caution. Most times only a one corner incident and does NOT mean slow down, Few racers slow way down (dangerous on a track) as you lose any advantage you had and will probably cause more crashes. Race control can only get the flags out so fast. Red means stop racing, but not forward progress. There is also a dedicated oil flag but clean oil is hard to see.