In this paper we analyze a system for brittle delamination between two visco-elastic bodies, also subject to inertia, which can be interpreted as a model for dynamic fracture. The rate-independent flow rule for the delamination parameter is coupled with the momentum balance for the displacement, including inertia. This model features a nonsmooth constraint ensuring the continuity of the displacements outside the crack set, which is marked by the support of the delamination parameter. A weak solvability concept, generalizing the notion of energetic solution for rate-independent systems to the present mixed rate-dependent/rate-independent frame, is proposed. Via refined variational convergence techniques, existence of solutions is proved by passing to the limit in approximating systems which regularize the nonsmooth constraint by conditions for adhesive contact. The presence of the inertial term requires the design of suitable recovery spaces small enough to provide compactness but large enough to recover the information on the crack set in the limit.2010 Mathematics Subject Classification: 49J53, 49J45, 74H20, 74C05, 74C10, 74M15, 74R10.The asymptotic analysis as k → ∞ for the purely rate-independent adhesive contact system, coupling the flow rule (1.3d) (with no regularizing gradient term), with the static momentum balance, was carried out in [RSZ09] by resorting to the evolutionary Γ-convergence results for rate-independent processes from [MRS08]. Loosely speaking, the main observation is that the adhesive contact contribution ΓC k 2 z|[[u]]| 2 dH d−1 to E k (1.6) penalizes displacement jumps in points with positive z, and leads as k → ∞], z) = ∞ otherwise, and G ∞ the Γ-limit as k → ∞ of the perimeter energies (G k ) k from (1.4). Let us stress that, adapting some arguments from [DML11], we shall prove that along semistable energetic solutions of the brittle system, the energy-dissipation inequality actually holds as a balance, along any arbitrary interval [s, t] ⊂ [0, T ] for almost all s ≤ t ∈ (0, T ), and for s = 0.Let us finally mention that our ansatz for G k and R k , cf. (1.4) and (1.7), will allow for different scalings of the parameters a 0 k , a 1 k , and b k , cf. (2.15). In this way, we can obtain different fracture models in the brittle limit. We will discuss the different options in Section 2.3.Plan of the paper. In Section 2 we give our weak solvability notion for damped inertial systems with a mixed rate-independent/rate-dependent character. In particular, in Sec. 2.1 we specify it in the context of the adhesive contact model and then state the existence of semistable energetic solutions to the adhesive system. In Sec. 2.2 we give the notion of semistable energetic solutions to the brittle system, while in Sec. 2.3 we present our main result, Theorem 2.10, which provides the existence of semistable energetic solutions for the brittle model in terms of an approximation result via the adhesive contact systems. We also compare our result with other existing results on dynamic fracture.The existence...