Firestone Firehawk 600 - Postponement

Postponement

Olvey contacted Dr. Richard Jennings, a former flight director at NASA and professor of aviation medicine at the University of Texas. They discussed the known levels of human tolerance of vertical g-loads. Jennings replied that the human body could not tolerate sustained loads of more than 4-4.5 Gs. CART determined that the race could not be run at more than 225 mph (362 km/h) without raising safety concerns over G-force induced Loss Of Consciousness.

The night before the race, CART officials attempted to make last-ditch efforts to curtail speeds by having the teams take downforce out of the car, and reduce horsepower. However, by Sunday morning, time was running out to make changes necessary to hold the race safely. The morning warm-up session was canceled. Two hours before the scheduled start, the race was postponed. Over 60,000 fans were sent home. The move came after CART president Joe Heitzler and chief steward Chris Kniefel had a series of meetings with drivers, owners and sponsors. All parties agreed that it didn't make sense to hold the race under the circumstances.

At a press conference, Heitzler did not blame the track. Rather, he stressed that officials could not in good conscience allow a race with such serious concerns about the safety of the drivers. Olvey added that the vertigo symptoms might have been intensified since the temperature was an unseasonably warm 80 degrees. There was fear of the possibility that drivers could suffer "grey-outs" or lose consciousness from G-LOC. It is also likely that the high g-loads would have been outside the design limits for the HANS device, which was required for all CART races at oval tracks.

Gossage was harshly critical of CART's decision. He argued that CART assured him it could run the race even though it had not conducted more extensive tests at the track. Russell argued that there was no time due to scheduling conflicts. Michael Andretti added that there was no real way to simulate ≈26 or more cars in a race. ESPN's Robin Miller later said that CART should have known there was a problem the minute the first driver clocked 230 mph (370 km/h) on Friday—which would have been plenty of time to slow down the cars and race safely.

CART officials held out the possibility of rescheduling the race, but there was no room in the schedule and it was ultimately canceled.

The Firehawk 600 marked the first time a CART race had been canceled outright due to driver safety issues. The 1985 Michigan 500 was postponed six days due to concerns about Goodyear's new radial tire. After three major crashes, drivers refused to participate, and the race was run the following weekend with the old bias-ply tires.

A decade later, the 2011 IZOD IndyCar World Championship was abandoned after 11 laps following the 15-car crash that killed the second-place driver in the Dayton Indy Lights race at Texas, Dan Wheldon. Drivers safety was cited as one of the reasons to formally abandon the race, as was track safety following damage to the catch fencing (the 1999 Visionaire 500 km at Lowe's Motor Speedway, the only other IRL race to be canceled outright, was abandoned after 61 laps following the death of three spectators caused by an errant tire).