On Saturday, the FIA Formula E paddock headed to Rome for the next race of the season. This particular round was a double-header on the streets of the Italian capital. During the race, there was a frightening accident, nine laps into the race. Sadly, this was a street track, so there was no run-off area for the car to safely occupy.

The scenes drew a lot of attention on social media and even attracted a fair number of NASCAR fans.

American fans found the incident awfully familiar to the NASCAR series

As it happened, the incident was triggered when Jaguar TCS Racing driver Sam Bird lost control and spun. His car then came to a stop bang in the middle of the track, a very dangerous position. What followed next was carnage and a carbon fiber confetti shower, leading to six cars retiring. Former Formula E champion Sebastien Buemi clipped Bird and was nearly sent airborne. Behind him, Antonio Felix da Costa also crashed and his car ended up almost under Buemi’s car. The worst was yet to come as Edoardo Mortara smashed straight into the stricken Jaguar.

Fans from across the pond compared this to the ARCA Series. This was largely because many of the cars were passing through at high speed or were not braking hard enough. Nevertheless, they have all seen how poor the ARCA brakes usually are, and they often led to a lot of wrecks.

So there were plenty of jokes that Formula E was giving the ARCA Series a run for its money.

Some were even calling the all-electric series the ‘ARCA open wheel series‘. The good news was that as gristly as the pile-up accident was, everyone walked away relatively unharmed. Of course, the accident brought out a red flag because there were broken and battered cars littered everywhere.

Another fan simply shook their head in disbelief, ‘We thought ARCA was bad….’. They do have a point, but the big difference between the ARCA Series and FE is that the latter primarily race on street tracks. On-street circuits, the margin for error is a lot smaller, so the smallest mistakes will be heavily punished. In the end, the race was resumed after the chaos was sorted out, and Mitch Evans went on to win the race.

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Some fans made a few suggestions to avoid such scenarios

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Aside from the shocked reactions, a few important questions were asked. One of them was, ‘Could having spotters for the drivers like in NASCAR have helped in this situation?’. This is actually very interesting because spotters have been employed in both NASCAR and IndyCar. Their primary occupation is to keep in constant touch with the driver and find the fastest path or the safest path.

According to another account, ‘I think there’s be a lot less bad crashes, or at least less pileups into a turned car if more racing series used spotters. Even Shane Van Gisbergen talked about how beneficial a spotter was in his first NASCAR race. Mentioned he would have just piled into a stopped car otherwise’.

Of course, a downside could be that having a spotter can be distracting for a driver. Especially considering that drivers will need to concentrate at the kind of speed that they’re achieving. On the other hand, if a driver like Shane Van Gisbergen can endorse the usefulness of spotters, maybe it is worth considering.

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