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1. This kind of culture of drivers alighting from cars to shake a fist or flip a bird at some other driver they feel did them wrong goes back to the beginning of motor racing history. In American motorsport though it's been encouraged and given a pass by the powers that be as a way of generating drama and rivalries. Not just in Nascar but this sort of thing goes on all the time in short track racing in the USA and has happened plenty of times in road racing series as well.
On the level though, it's a retarded thing to do. You have cars that weigh a ton or two moving at speed on track with a lot of other things going on. That others have not been killed or severely injured(maybe some have) and the fact that sanctioning bodies let this behavior go on, really is a surprise to me. It's dangerous for both involved and ridiculous that sanctioning bodies have not stamped this out before something like this happened.
2. It's impossible for anyone to say that Tony Stewart did this deliberately at this moment in time.
For one thing in my life there are plenty of times I have hit the gas to avoid an accident to get my car out of the way of deer, people and other cars that have jumped out in front of me. These sprint cars don't have great brakes and if someone is running at you on one of these dirt circuits, I'm not so sure hitting the brakes in this case would have made it any better.
3. Has anyone here been to an American short track dirt race with sprint cars at night? Often because there is little breeze at night, the dust hangs in the air. It's dark, the track lighting systems are imperfect, there are shadows, it's dusty, you are moving at speed and your eyes don't work as well in a half lit nighttime scenario. This isn't a paved track at 2pm in the afternoon.
4. Motorsport is a big boy game. It isn't checkers or tiddlywinks. You can die very quickly and especially so doing foolish things. It's bad enough that you can die from sudden deceleration or an incident on track, lets not make it worse with drivers running around on foot on track. People have mentioned criminal charges. That's not the way it works. This is a sporting arena where you can die and sometimes people do. It's a risk and one that some people choose to maximize that risk and some choose to minimize that risk. It's an extremely difficult case to make for criminal charges because of the environment and that the deceased chose to put himself on foot and in the path of circulating cars on a race track. If on a long shot, criminal charges are filled, the defendant will have paid motorsport-specific expert witnesses to testify and it will never stick. A civil court case and more likely a settlement will be the result.
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