The Night the VisionAire 500K Was Stopped

On May 1, 1999, rescue workers were treating spectators in the fourth-turn grandstands at Lowe’s Motor Speedway when officials canceled the VisionAire 500K. Debris from a three-car crash had flown into the seats, killing three people and injuring others. The Indy Racing League event in Concord, North Carolina, would not resume.

John Paul Jr. and Stan Wattles struck the fourth-turn retaining wall and spun down the front stretch, collecting Scott Harrington’s car. Spectators near the crash said a tire and suspension parts entered the grandstands. Joe Tiano, of Hickory, North Carolina, was sitting about 150 feet away in a neighboring section. “It came up here like a rocket and then started bouncing around,” he said.

Authorities cleared the affected section, and the race was red-flagged while emergency workers attended to the injured. Track security employees stood around the medical personnel, holding up white sheets as they worked. Within minutes of the crash, all three drivers had been examined at the infield care center and released.

Area hospitals reported treating at least eight people. Two were flown to Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, where, spokeswoman Kirstin Bass said, a child was in critical condition late that night and an adult was in serious condition. Three adults flown to University Hospital were in good condition. Three other injured spectators went by ambulance to Northeast Medical Center in Concord, which also received the three people who had been killed.

The source of the debris was not immediately settled. Television replays did not conclusively show what had entered the stands. At a news conference after the cancellation, speedway president H.A. “Humpy” Wheeler and IRL founder Tony George said they were unsure which car had lost the tire. Both Wattles’s and Paul’s cars were missing tires after the crash; Wattles’s impact had occurred closest to the injured spectators.

The speedway had raised its catch fences to 15 feet in 1997, before its first IRL race. For those races, it also kept spectators out of the bottom seven rows nearest the racing surface. The deaths were the first spectator fatalities at the track and in the IRL, which had been founded in 1996.

Wheeler went into the stands where the debris had landed and tried to comfort spectators. About 15 minutes after the crash, he used the public-address system to announce that the race was canceled. “This is a terrible thing,” he said. “It’s very regrettable. It’s something we’ll live with for a very, very long time.”

Ninety minutes after the crash, the nearly 50,000 spectators had left the track. Investigators took measurements and roped off the accident scene. In the infield, about 200 drivers and crew members gathered for a prayer service.

“We’ve never done anything like this before,” Wheeler said of stopping the race. “But it seemed like the right thing to do in respect to those who lost their lives up there.”