Not sure why the blogger states "the footage has never been seen before now". The footage has been out there for the past 46 years. It's been widely discussed, dissected, and analyzed for the past 10-15 years or so on the web. But I guess that's what bloggers do, they make everything sound like it's "just been discovered".
The Pace Car maintains a high speed down the pit lane in case they wave off the start due to the cars not forming up properly. The pace speed is 100 mph. In the case of Eldon Palmer, he was just inexperienced. He wasn't expecting the car to go a little off kilter when he slammed on the brakes. When you hit the brakes hard on a classic muscle car, the wheels tend to lock up immediately (have lots of classic footage of muscle car road tests showing 4-wheel smoke shows from 70 mph and the car going sideways). Palmer was probably not expecting this and panicked.
After this incident, Indy used ex-race drivers, or people experienced with handling fast cars, so this would not happen again. That lasted until 2001 when they stuck John Mellencamp's wife in an Olds Bravada and let her do the pace lap. She was a fashion model, the first woman to drive an Indy 500 Pace Car, and the Olds Bravada was the first SUV to pace an Indy 500. After 2001, they let anyone drive the pace car that had a movie to promote, TV show to promote, etc. There was Morgan Freeman, Lance Armstrong, Colin Powell, Guy Fieri (TV chef), Robin Roberts (TV newscaster), Jim Harbaugh (NFL), Josh Dumahel (The Transformers movie), etc.
There were quite a few GTO's that paced races around the country, many were unknown until recently. Have a few really cool photos found in the archives of the Pontiac-Oakland Museum that will be shown in a future article for POCI's "Smoke Signals".
Mike
|
05-30-2017, 02:15 AM
Hybrid Mode
