Goodyear reconstructed the tire and believes that the failure was caused by a puncture, which in turn caused the tire to come apart while the car was traveling at over 300 mile per hour.
“When the tire shake and the tire failure with the blow-out, losing part of the tire, caused it to become extreme shaking, as far as we can tell, his head was shaken side-to-side so violently that it just terribly injured his brain,” Melvin said. “That is it oscillated in a manner that was so violent, the head just -- it just oscillated back and forth from one side to the other. There wasn't a single-point impact involved. It was a relatively high-frequency attack to the brain.”
Melvin clarified exactly what they believe happened based on the data they’ve gathered so far.
“Basically what they're trying to explain is that a portion of the tire that came out caused the remaining tire to come apart radically. However, it stayed attached to the rim,” Melvin said. “When you have a section of the tire that is still connected to the rim and just immediately following that section of tire, there is no tire left on the rim. The radius or distance that piece of the tire was from the center line of the axle that velocity produced a force somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 to 60,000 pounds, that's 20 to 30 tons worth of force. That outer tread of the tire was still attached to the rim. As it went around, it was intersecting anything in its path and removing that from the racecar. Every time the tire hit the ground, you had a force of somewhere over 40,000 pounds. Then the next immediate area of the rim that rotated went straight down to the racetrack surface.
You have approximately an 18-inch movement up and down with the force of about 40,000 or more pounds.”