Charles Kong Soo

Pro­mot­er of the Llumar se­ries of drag rac­ing events at Waller­field, Rishi Kan­ick has post­poned his Au­gust 21 event, as well as oth­er fu­ture drag rac­ing events un­til the track is up­grad­ed.

The post­pone­ment fol­lows last Sun­day's ac­ci­dent when a race car went air­borne and col­lid­ed with the stands and spec­ta­tors, in­jur­ing Kavesh Sookhan, Jynelle Ma­haraj, Am­ri­ka Arm­strong and Tri­cia Per­sad. They are all ward­ed in sta­ble con­di­tion at the Er­ic Williams Med­ical Sci­ences Com­plex.

Kan­ick said at the last event dri­vers were con­cerned about the dip on the track at the Frankie Boodram Rac­ing Fa­cil­i­ty. He said they were go­ing to en­sure the dip was re­paired and that an ad­e­quate num­ber of bar­ri­ers were in place. He said the main con­cern was the wel­fare of spec­ta­tors and called on of­fi­cials to do their jobs.

There are re­ports that the ac­ci­dent may have been caused by an oil slick from an ear­li­er race.

This sce­nario was ad­vanced by a race car builder and dri­ver who wit­nessed the ac­ci­dent at the Caribbean Mo­tor Rac­ing Cham­pi­onships (CM­RC) held un­der the aus­pices of the T&T Au­to­mo­bile Sports As­so­ci­a­tion (TTASA) and who is al­so fa­mil­iar with the track.

Speak­ing with the Sun­day Guardian on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty on Wednes­day, the race car dri­ver said, "What we saw in the videos was an ac­cu­mu­la­tion of mis­takes. There might have been some slight oil or a slick sub­stance on the track which was cleaned up from the pre­vi­ous race. "The ac­ci­dent oc­curred in the sec­ond fastest cor­ner on the track, if a car los­es con­trol there at high speed it be­comes a pro­jec­tile. "The first car, a Maz­da RX-7 came in and cleared away the tyre bar­ri­er, hit the berm and then took out the bot­tom of the fence."

He said the sec­ond car, a Suzu­ki Swift, with no tyre bar­ri­er to slow it down, a berm that had al­ready been flat­tened and a sec­tion of the fence ripped down, bar­reled through the same gap as the Maz­da RX-7 and ca­reened in­to the crowd in­jur­ing four of the spec­ta­tors.

The dri­ver said the ac­ci­dent could have been much worse. Show­ing the video of the crash in slow mo­tion to the Sun­day Guardian, he point­ed out that the left front wheel of the Suzu­ki Swift dri­ven by David Lyons snagged the top of the fence, pulling the left side of his car down­wards in­to the ground slow­ing down its for­ward mo­men­tum where it crashed in­to the bot­tom of the stands in­stead of dead cen­tre. The dri­ver said if the first car had not bro­ken through the crash bar­ri­ers the Suzu­ki Swift most like­ly would not have got­ten all the way in­to the stands.

He said there were faster, heav­ier, more pow­er­ful cars in the race such as an Au­di, Mit­subishi Evo­lu­tion and Maz­da RX-3, and if any one of them had lost con­trol it prob­a­bly would have gone fur­ther in­to the stands than the Suzu­ki Swift.

The dri­ver said he did not no­tice any skid marks for the Suzu­ki Swift as there were for the Maz­da RX-7 when it spun out, which led him to be­lieve per­haps there was a trac­tion prob­lem.

Boodas­ingh: Rac­ing pro­ce­dure done dif­fer­ent­ly this year

Du­ane Boodas­ingh, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of Trini­Tuner.com, T&T's largest au­to­mo­tive web­site said in 2014 and 2015 when Robert Amar was the pres­i­dent of TTASA, every­thing was done for the CM­RC events by the as­so­ci­a­tion such as pro­mo­tions, mar­ket­ing, lo­gis­tics and com­pe­ti­tions.

He said this year the pro­ce­dure was a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. The as­so­ci­a­tion sent out a re­quest for pro­pos­al and the pro­mot­er who won the ten­der, Kan­ick was re­spon­si­ble for set­ting up events, mar­ket­ing, in­fra­struc­ture and fa­cil­i­ties, en­abling TTASA to fo­cus more on the com­pe­ti­tion as­pect.

Boodas­ingh said Kan­ick had ex­pe­ri­ence run­ning events sanc­tioned by TTASA and nu­mer­ous drag rac­ing events this year and last year.

He said the Min­istry of Sports had con­tact­ed TTASA about putting safe­ty pro­to­cols in place and they com­plied.