We’re heading up through Korea towards Seoul on the high-speed train, but today there is a sense of weariness in the party. It was a long night. Not just because we were doing the usual tiring post-Grand Prix routine of crashing out words, but because at around five o’clock in the morning word began to arrive of the huge IndyCar shunt at Las Vegas. At the time I was writing a story for my business newsletter which suggested that Dan Wheldon was on the verge of agreeing a deal to replace Danica Patrick in the Go Daddy-sponsored entry at Andretti Autosport for next year.

The first reports from Las Vegas were confused, as they often are when there is a big accident. In my experience even Media Centres are unreliable places after big crashes. People fears the worst and rumours spread faster than the wildest of fires. With modern technology as it is, Twittle-tattle is a dangerous thing.

Youtube videos of the accident began to appear and one could begin to understand the scale of the incident and to see that the drivers involved had no real chance of reacting to what was happening ahead of them. In most forms of racing there is still time to react, but with IndyCars on flat-out ovals, everyone is travelling at maximum speed – all the time. The cars are all close together, three and even four abreast, and that means that there is virtually no reaction time.

Formula 1 is fast and exciting but, apart from the first laps of races, the fights usually involve two or perhaps three cars, dicing but not stacked up as they are on the ovals. The drivers are usually able to react to what happens ahead of them, but even then there are crashes, such as the one we saw last year when Mark Webber rode over the back of Heikki Kovalainen in Valencia. Watching three or four such accidents happening simultaneously in Las Vegas was stunning.

The thing that shocked me the most was the randomness of it all. Racing drivers never dwell on these things for long. They believe that it will never happen to them. If they did not believe that they would not race the cars as they do. But I am sure that today all of them will be mulling the thought: There, but for the grace of God, go I. And how true that it.

In Formula 1 we are used to seeing drivers walk away from every crash. The safety engineers have done so many brilliant things in the last 15 years that there are even a few misguided folk who believe that danger can be designed out of the sport. That is naive because when racing cars go out of control, no-one controls trajectories, no-one can predict the interplay between cars and parts as they bounce around. A wheel tagged here and a glancing blow there can completely change the effects of a crash. People say there is no luck in motor racing, but that is not strictly true. Luck is always involved when things are out of control.

Think back a few years to 2006 when a piece of flying debris flew into the cockpit of Sebastian Vettel’s Renault World Series car during a crash at Spa and cut deeply into his finger. Surgeons were able to save the finger and Vettel was soon back in action. Think also of Red Bull Racing’s Helmut Marko, who lost an eye in his first race in a decent F1 car back in 1972 when a stone was thrown up and hit him. Think of Felipe Massa who races just as ever he did. An inch here or there makes all the difference. Think of Henry Surtees, killed by a glancing blow of an errant wheel from another car in a Formula 2 race at Brands Hatch, a week after Massa was injured by flying debris in Hungary.

“We all know this is part of the sport,” said Oriol Servia in Las Vegas. “Cars are getting safer, tracks are getting safer so fortunately it hasn’t happened in a long time. We knew it could happen, but it’s just really sad. It’s so tough to understand when somebody is gone that quickly.”