Dr. Steven Olvey: I thought maybe they’d been flying a lot. This can happen with people doing a lot of flying, because the ear canals have little stones that if they’re in the right place, doing the right thing, they keep our balance under control. But if they get dislodged and one stone gets in one of the canals that it’s not supposed to be in, it can throw you off. I had sent drivers through the years to an ear, nose and throat specialist for this, and they know how to get it fixed. So I thought, “Well, that’s probably what this is because it’s not that uncommon.”

I went and talked to some of the drivers, and they actually felt worse than they usually do with this kind of ear thing. And then I got the idea that it sounded more like it was related to the G levels that they were getting. So I asked one of the team managers at Paul Tracy’s team to see what kind of readings their guys were getting in the cars.

Paul had run 237 miles an hour or something, and the computer said they were getting 3.5 vertical Gs and 5.5 lateral Gs. That seemed pretty high. And we never had a combination like that where you had both vertical and lateral Gs pretty much off the charts.

So I called a friend of mine who used to be the medical director for NASA, Richard Jennings. I called him because he was stationed at NASA in Houston; he works for SpaceX now. I had trouble getting hold of him. He was not at home and his wife said that she wasn’t sure where he was going.

As Dr. Olvey chased Dr. Jennings, CART moved into the afternoon’s proceedings with qualifying.

Dr. Steven Olvey: I spent probably two hours trying to track him down, calling his cell phone over and over. All of a sudden, there’s a hand on my shoulder and I turn around and look it up and it’s him! He just decided to come up and see everybody and he’s a big race fan; goes to Indy every year. He said, “You look kind of upset.” And I said, “Well, we’ve got a major issue here. We’re not really sure how bad an issue it is or what’s going on, but it’s just weird. We’ve got drivers that got sick when they drove, we’ve had two crashes and we don’t have any idea of why the cars crashed. And these are the Gs we’re getting.”

He looked at the tracing that I had and how high the Gs were. He says, “You’ve got a big problem.” And I said, “OK, what’s the big problem?” He says, “Well, it’s physiologically not possible to drive with this combination of vertical and lateral Gs. It’s worse than any rollercoaster that’s ever been built.”

After talking to Richard, I knew we had a major problem because he’s an expert. Then I got hold of [former chief steward] Wally Dallenbach and Joe Heitzler, the [CART] CEO.

The complexity of the issue facing CART officials was illustrated by the mix of symptoms – or lack of them – encountered by the drivers. Phil Abbott/Motorsport Images

The problem was far from linear. Some drivers were heavily affected by the extreme Gs while others were asymptomatic. It would eventually make achieving a consensus among drivers on how to proceed with the event more challenging than anyone desired.

Kenny Brack: I didn’t experience any problems. But I know many other drivers did.

Scott Dixon: I never experienced any of the issues. I never had any of the dizziness or the blacking out.

Max Papis: driver, Team Rahal: It was badass to drive around at 230. I just felt amazing. I loved every lap I did. I loved the feeling of getting squashed in the car vertically, laterally…. If you ask me, I didn’t know it was too much for my body, but I was one of the most fit drivers as well. Did it feel weird? Yes, but I guess that it was more weird for other people.

Chris Kneifel, chief steward: When you have a car fly up into the air, that’s pretty obvious, right? That’s something that is plain to see what we were dealing with. This was something that was an invisible monster, and it was something that was every little bit different to the individual. So it wasn’t that you could say it would be in a minute for this guy. This guy’s good for five minutes of running, or 10, or maybe it doesn’t even happen to this guy but, sooner or later, almost everyone’s going to have a problem. And you start to realize how large the magnitude of the situation was.

And the thing was the crashes. It’s not that crashes don’t happen. Obviously they do. But it was the fact that you look at the data and it’s not like the car got loose. It’s not like he hit a bump; you look at the steering trace, everything was perfect.

So what happened? The unexplained was happening. It was hard to comprehend, to really get your head around what was going on. But when you take that and you couple it with the fact that the cars were almost doing three laps a minute, it’s just massive, massive speeds we hadn’t seen like that before.

It really boiled down to the human element and so many of the drivers who I had face-to-face conversations with, I could tell by just looking in their eyes. They didn’t have to say a word. You could just see it. You knew something was different. And that group of drivers was as upper echelon as there ever was.

Dr. Steven Olvey: I got with Wally and Joe and said, “Guys, we can’t run here at these speeds.” And they said, “What do you mean?” And I went over it all and I had Richard there talk to him and he said, “You can’t keep doing this. It’s physiologically possible. You’d have guys blacking out and crashing right and left and it could be a disaster.”