I have seen some awful wrecks in F-1 races. One guy hit a wall at 120 MPH-yet he walked away from the wreck! Is it because:
-the full-body harness-type seat belts provide better safety?
-(or) the F-1 cars are designed to crumple and absorb the force of the crash?
I’ve always wonderd why regular cars aren’t equipped with harness type seatbelts-it seems that these would spread the forces over more of the body that the lap/shoulder belts now used. Can you buy and install these in a regular car?
A big part of it is that the cars are designed to break apart to dissipate energy. The crashes are spectacular but some of it is due to design of the car. The idea is to get rid of the energy before it has to be absorbed by the driver’s body.
The full-body harness is essential even without the crashes - under heavy braking, it literally stops the driver being flung out of the car. And yes, it’s essential to surviving these crashes, too.
The spectacular nature of the crashes is partly because of safety design, with many parts of the car (wheels, wings, etc.) designed to come off the car, dissipating energy away from the carbon fibre shell within which the driver is seated. Also, don’t ignore the fact that these guys are in extraordinary physical condition, and so are in a far better position to withstand the vast g-forces involved.
another way of thinking about it is that it’s not how fast you go that matters, it’s how fast you stop. all the features noted above are to help stage the decelaration to a survivable rate
Another key element is the HANS (Head And Neck Something) device. That is the weird thing they have on their shoulders that is attached to their helmet. It severely restricts the movement of the head under heavy g-loads. It not only allows their heads to keep more or less attached to their necks on high speed turns and breaking but, most importantly, on crashes. It simply tethers the helmet to a rigid structure attached to the back and shoulders. It makes so much of a difference because, no matter how good your seat harness is, your head (plus helmet) is very heavy and otherwise only attached to the rest of the mass of the car-driver by the neck, which is relatively weak. It is only recently that other categories are beginning ti pick up on it, mostly due to the first generation of HANS F1 drivers retiring to them.
That plus what has been said about structural integrity of the car. The chassis is very regulated and must pass a very severe crash test. The front wing, rear wing assembly, engine, gear box and side pods are all designed as crumple zones around a very rigid tub where the driver seat. The wheels are tethered to the chassis to prevent them from flying away or entering the cockpit.
We owe most of this to Giles Villeneuve and Ayrton Senna whose deaths on track, although not the only ones, really marked the two periods of safety conscience on F1. Giles’s for structural integrity and Senna’s for crumpling and tethering
Take a look at F1 cars of the 80’s and see how those guys were pretty much head and shoulders above the chassis. Modern divers are cocooned in there.
I don’t think anyone has died of a neck-related injury while wearing a HANS device (or equivalent)…
As everyone here has already said, it’s essentially both, and other safety measures as well. The biggest revolution in all motorsports (not just F1) over the past two decades has been the extensive improvements in every aspect of safety equipment, both worn by the drivers (fire-retardant suits, gloves, boots, and underwear), including the helmets and HANS (Head and Neck Support) device, and in the cockpit and other aspects of the cars’ designs. Another safety innovation used in oval racing, but not so much (yet) in F1 or European road racing is the SAFER barrier, the so-called “soft” wall that helps dissipate collision energy.
It is estimated that, from the birth of autoracing in the early 20th century through the 1970s, roughly half of all pro drivers died in a car. In the past two decades, improvements in safety technology have reduced serious injuries substantially and made fatalities extremely rare.
Yes, and I have, but strictly for use on track, not on the street. As I’ve said on other occasions (here, here, and here), a five-point harness is far from practical for daily use:
In short, standard three-point belts are very effective and a great compromise between convenience and safety.
Part of the safety of F1 cars, possibly the major part, is not in the car at all. Probably the major part at that.
Incidents such as the notorious Le Mans event, whilst it was not F1 race, have ensured that spectators are kept well away, and having qualifying times where the slowest is no worse than 5% or 10% slower than the fastest ensures that huge speed differance between cars prior to this are nothing like as great.
When F1 cars go greentracking, they are not going to hit trees, as Jim Clark did, they are not going to fly up an embankments, or fall down one, the armco for the most part is aligned such that cars will strike them sideways glancing blows rather than direct on, even the concrete barriers at the start/finish straight of the Canadian GP circuit are such that cars only hit them side on, so wheels absorb much of the impact.
The run off areas are large and obviously strategically placed, and the gravel medium is carefully selected in sizing to grip the car enough to slow it, but not too much to grab and flip it, and unfortunately this gravel size is not very suitable for bike racers as it tends to grab bikes too hard and flip them, which is why those tracks that can’t swap their gravel out easily tend not to be used for both types of racing.
Tracks are very very much shorter, the old days of a 20 minute wait for rescue because the fire appliance is miles away whilst you are trapped upside down in a blazing car at the Nurburgring are gone.
Marshalls are much better trained, they react far faster in warning of upcoming hazards, this has been iaided hugely by the reliablility of portable radios. Hopefully we will never get another incident like the one that killed Tom Pryce and a marshall.
Protocols to ensure tracks and pit lanes are free, not just during the race but also during practice sessions are rigorously enforced, crews who do not clear areas fast enough cost their drivers ten or more places.
Many drivers died not in races, but in practice and qualifying, probably more were killed this way but the same standards of track services are applied to these as the race itself.
Even at the very tight circuits where there is little run off or escape lanes, there is a moblie crane, usually several, at every likely crash point so that cars can be righted for rescue and clear the obstruction rapidly.
The track modifications go as far as slowing the cars down, look at the famous Mulsanne straight, if an wing were to break apart on there, cars get airborne or spin out at well over 220mph, sine the change, they don’t quite get so quick.
Pressures on drivers when under extreme high speed cornering have been reduced, the extremely high speed corners of the type that killed Ratzenberger and Senna have been changed.
Those huge mechanical and biological pressures stress the car structure immensly whilst at the same time reducing the drivers ability to react.Which is a testing combination.
Car modifications incude the use of leak free fuel tanks, anyone following a few decades of F1 racing will recall quite a number of incidents where relatively routine crashes turned into fatal incidents because of burning fuel, we see modern F1 crashes and the only fire incidnets you tend to get is when an engine eats istelf and some of the lubricant burns for a very short period giving off the characterisitci thick black smoke, but these fires very quickly burn out and are small.
Other modifications have been made to ensure speed reduction in corners, this has been ongoing for years, things such as ground brush skirts banned, undertray height has been increased, sizes of wings must be no greater than certain dimensions.
Certain parts of the car are crash tested and must meet set standards, car shells are routinely tested to destruction, and every F1 car must meet the requirements, such as accelerometer tests for crumple/ablation zones(if you have seen an F1 nose cone shatter in slo mo, then you ill appreciate that ‘crumple’ is a mild way to describe the way it is designed to shatter in a controlled manner.
You also must not underestimate the design of the drivers seat, it is a crucial safety component, as it cannot be allowed to break away or move, it must be able to withstand impact and penetration from below as its not unknown for cars to rip themselves apart on high kerbs or parts of other cars, especially when ground clearance is often lost when a wheel or two breaks off.
Thanks for the fantastic information, but I’ve got to ask:
What were these?
The skirts used on F1 cars were a means of ensuring that air passing beneath the car created a Bernoulli effect where the speed of airflow increased and so reduced pressure, foricng the car down onto the track and increasing grip, this was done using air dams and controllong the flow.
Lotus used them, but soon everyone did, such was the advantage conferred, and the skirts at first consisted of a brush like affair down the sides of the car, to prevent air leaking out and disturbing the flow.
http://www.ddavid.com/formula1/lotus79.htm
Casdave has made some very good points.
A point that I meant to add is that F1 and all other road racing sanctioning bodies are constantly adjusting the rules to slow the cars down. Unconstrained, the engineers could make cars that go 240, 250, 260 mph or more. And drivers, being drivers, would get in them and try to go faster. But since 2000, when Gil de Ferran set the World Closed-Course Speed Record of 241.428 mph in a Champ Car at the California Motor Speedway, open wheel racing series have been consistently working to keep speeds below about 230.
I don’t have a cite, but I seem to recall hearing that in the 240 mph range, it becomes too difficult/expensive to protect the driver from serious harm in a collision. And when I tell you that the top F1 teams spend $200-400 million a year, saying that a task is too expensive is really saying something!
Another point that occurs to me is that safety awareness has spread beyond protecting just the drivers. When I started watching Champ Car racing in the early 1990s, pit crew members did not wear helmets and sometimes worked in shorts. Now AFAIK, crew members in all racing series, including NASCAR, Champ Cars, IRL, and F1 wear fire suits and helmets.
Fan safety has also been enhanced. After tires broke free and flew into the stands at two open-wheel races in 1998 and 1999, killing six (three in each incident) and injuring more than a dozen more, catch fences have been extended further and carbon-fiber wheel tethers have been added to the cars.
I was just watching the 1966 film Grand Prix on Speed Channel last night. It’s always a bit of a shock to see old footage of racers wearing leather helmets and plain cotton jump suits, with no seat belts. Some people talk about the Golden Age of racing, but I think that keeping the participants alive at the end of the day makes this the Golden Age.
ground brush skirts were part of the whole ground effect kit that sucked the air under from under the car gluing it to the track. They increased downforce to ridiculous levels and allowed for very high corner speeds.
Until they failed.
Then it was you and a tin can hurtling towards a wall with next to zero traction to stop you.
And then we got Yuji Ide and the whole thing was lost. :rolleyes:
Dale Earnhardt’s death was a turning point in the acceptance of HANS devices in NASCAR. They were already widely used in open wheel racing, but NASCAR drivers tended to shun them. After Earnhardt died, most safety experts felt that a HANS device would have saved his life, and that was the watershed event that made NASCAR drivers change their minds.
While much certainly depends on engineering and materials, blind luck, is also a factor
Do they use the HANS in NASCAR? Can they squeeze in with that thing on?
It’s tight, but as the headrest is already very restrictive, this just makes it a little bit more so. I think most enter the car, then attach the device. When the get out, they take the whole thing with them, and remove it outside the car (not always, but certainly when they are in “a hurry,” post crash).