Dan Wheldon Crash: Safety Must Be the Priority for IndyCars in 2012

The video of IndyCar driver Dan Wheldon's tragic and fatal crash at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Sunday will hopefully make safety a top priority heading into next season.

One increasingly popular way to make the sport of IndyCar safer is to not race the cars on small oval tracks.

These tracks are not only more dangerous because they have steeper turns, they are often not as wide and thus have too many cars too close to one another.

This means that cars have a higher probability of bumping each other and starting multi-vehicle crashes that can seriously injure people, as seen in the video below.

When you have 34 cars on a small, 1.5-mile oval, there is going to be a good chance that a few cars bump into each other at top speeds.

IndyCars need to race at rectangular tracks that are much larger than their oval counterparts. For example, the Las Vegas Motor Speedway is a 1.5-mile oval track designed for NASCAR races, while the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (home of the Indy 500) is a 2.5-mile rectangular track.

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway is much better for IndyCars because it was built for these kinds of cars, and having Indy races on tracks not like these are only going to cause problems for racers.

Tracks designed for NASCAR races were made for stock cars, and having IndyCar races on them is a terrible idea.

Five time Sprint Cup series champion Jimmie Johnson has been championing the idea that IndyCars shouldn't race on ovals:

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"I wouldn't run them on ovals. There's just no need to," said Johnson, whose five championships give him a bit more knowledge of racing than your average fan. "Those cars are fantastic for street circuits, for road courses. I hate, hate, hate that this tragedy took place. But hopefully they can learn from it and make those cars safer on ovals somehow ... Myself, I have a lot of friends that race in that series, and I'd just rather see them on street circuits and road courses. No more ovals."

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IndyCar racers must learn from Wheldon's tragic death and find more suitable race tracks for IndyCars, which will keep drivers safer.

Having too many cars on a small track will only cause more crashes.