Caruso’s Corner: Reliving the carnage of Tasmania
Drive Racing’s Michael Caruso recalls last year’s Symmons Plains smash-up derby
Now that the glamour of the Adelaide 500 and the Australian Grand Prix is behind us, this weekend the Supercars circus goes back to its roots and the scene of one of the biggest crashes in our sport's recent history.
We're in Tasmania for the third round of the season, racing at Symmons Plains just outside of Launceston - and the differences between where we've been and what we face this weekend couldn't be greater. Symmons Plains is the shortest circuit on our calendar and the simple nature of the track can create absolute chaos.
Last year's race was an interesting one for me, and one I'm sure a lot of my rivals would rather forget as the first race was abandoned after a massive pile-up on the opening lap took out almost half of the field.
I had a pretty unique perspective of the whole thing. Our team manager, Scott Sinclair, was engineering my car for the weekend as my regular engineer was at home for the birth of his child. As a result, we didn't have the best of qualifying sessions and, on a track where microseconds make a huge difference - the entire field is usually covered by a few tenths - I started near the back of the grid.
With that in mind, we decided to roll the dice on our tyre strategy because, as is usually the case in Tasmania at this time of year, there was a bit of rain around and we decided to start on slick tyres with a damp track, hoping to jump the rest of the field when they pitted for the same tyres as the circuit dried out. We were one of only a handful of cars to try this, and it could have paid off big time.
Except we won't ever know. I remember having absolutely no grip off the start line and waddled around the first corner, and then all hell broke loose in front of me...by the time I'd made it to the hairpin, half of the field had detonated into each other.
It's hard to know what to think when you come across a carpark of steaming, banged-up race cars; my first thought was for the safety of the drivers involved and then I thought this is good for us. Fortunately the safety of our cars these days is so high that no-one was hurt.
Anyway, it took the time allocated for the entire race to clean-up the carnage so the race was cancelled after just 600 metres, and we'll never know if that gamble for slicks would have paid off. On the flipside, my car wasn't damaged and we could go again.
I’ve be lucky enough to not have any injuries in my motor racing career so far. When incidents like that happen they tend to happen so quick and you’re making rapid-fire decisions from instinct. The most common thing to consider, if you’re going to make contact with a wall in an incident, is to release your hands from the steering wheel - this ensures you don’t break your wrists or hands if the steering wheel snaps in another direction. Given your normal human instinct of wanting to control the situation, that’s the hardest thing to achieve mentally. As a racing driver you always expect to be in control of the car, and removing your hands off the wheel releases that control.
The way that incident unfolded last year was unique. But given the same circumstances, the track layout and just how competitive our championship is right now, it might well happen again. If you’re at the front of the pack then you can avoid being involved, and that's what we’ll be aiming to do today in qualifying. We had good pace at the Grand Prix and just didn’t quite nail the right calls at the right time with the really quick qualifying sessions and the changing weather on Saturday.
With a unique qualifying format and the only hairpin of its kind in the Championship, this weekend will present a number of challenges and I'm sure the whole field, especially the mechanics that worked through the night to repair the cars, hopes that doesn’t include having to deal with an incident like last year.
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