Seriously, HOW THE FUCK DO YOU WALK AWAY FROM THAT SHIT? How many G's would he be pulling while flying UPSIDE DOWN through that gravel trap?!?!?

The mind boggles...

Yeah I love modern F1 technology. The cars are insane. Supercars are similar, you see the odd ferrari wreck where there's a carbon fibre passenger cell sitting in a paddock half a km from the nearest road that the driver climbed out of fine, the rest of the car is stuck in a tree somewhere.

Thought that when I saw it on the news, and the dopey newsreaders making the statement that he was lucky, I thought it was more the case that some bloody clever engineer did his job awesomely well.

I even googled to remind myself when the last one was, which was down to some muppet putting a crane in the runoff area while the cars were still racing, even then it's gone from one death every year or two up to the 80's to one a decade or thereabouts.

The more stuff that breaks and flies off, the more energy is dissipated and the better your chances get.

I saw a high speed video sequence of crashing a carbon fibre F1 tub into a wall. The tube was literally chipping itself into pieces and each piece taking away as much energy from the impact as it could. The smaller fragments you get, the better.

Until the driver dies from inhaling them.

The thought did cross my mind, it would suck if a peice of debris hit you in the wrong places as you were flung about.

He rolled onto gravel without touching the top of the car. It was lucky and looked spectacular - a bit like this ...


As for getting hit by carbon fiber well Ex F1 driver Justin Wilson got hit in the head from a nose cone from another car which killed him in an Indy car race. Felipa Massa got hit in the face by a spring and lunched his visor leaving him with a nasty scar.

The days of open cockpits are numbered as even the closed cockpit endurance cars have moved on from that and The FIA are pushing the WEC cars to have a pod/coffin that can be removed from the car with the driver in it.

Scotty wrote:The thought did cross my mind, it would suck if a peice of debris hit you in the wrong places as you were flung about.

Isn't that what killed Ayrton Senna, a bit of his own car hitting him on the head during the crash?

I vaguely recall that was part of the reason for adding the tether straps to the wheels (the other being to stop them from escaping into the crowd) and the raised cockpit surround to reduce the exposure of the drivers heads.

neels wrote:

Scotty wrote:The thought did cross my mind, it would suck if a peice of debris hit you in the wrong places as you were flung about.

Isn't that what killed Ayrton Senna, a bit of his own car hitting him on the head during the crash?

Yeah. A carbon fibre suspension strut to the helmet. Apparently no marks on him.

Re Scotty's original Q re "how the f**k & how many G's" remember that these days drivers wear the HANS device that connects the shoulder seatbelts to the helmet via 'tethers' and this restrains the neck from being forced through injurious angles = no more (or far less serious) brain stem injuries (the like of which accounted for Gilles Villeneuve in 1982).

Enclosed cockpits/halo's are generating a bit of press, with Lewis Hamilton for one saying he would not use one - though of course he may well be forced to by regulation.

pedalingkiwi wrote:Enclosed cockpits/halo's are generating a bit of press, with Lewis Hamilton for one saying he would not use one - though of course he may well be forced to by regulation.

Enclosed cockpit might not seem so bad when someone needs to do this though....

But then Lewis thought that the qualifying at the last race was a good idea.

This is a similar end over end crash last weekend at Goodwood. 1961 Lotus Grand Prix car (the epitome of unsafe race cars) crashing end over end and down into an underpass. The driver only suffered a broken collar bone. Formula 1 is contrived and manipulated that even the crashes are boring.

Yeah we should get excited because people might die!