![]() ![]() Part of racing is dodging bullets as well as firing them. I like the fact that racecar drivers are putting more on the line than the golfer who might get a twinge in his back or the tennis player who might get an achy elbow. Whatever readers may think on reading this story, I do regard myself as a purist, and the element of danger is part of my attraction to racing. To which my response was, “So the hell what?” Unless Fernando is claustrophobic – in which case, he’s chosen a strange career – it made no difference whether he wriggled out by himself or awaited marshals to turn his car shiny side up. Following Alonso’s shunt at Melbourne this year, where his car came to rest on its side against a barrier – at a similar angle to Newgarden’s Texas wall interface – several people were quick to allege that Alonso would not have been able to climb out by himself had the car being running a Halo. OK, pitstop errors have seen fuel spill onto and/or around the driver… but again, a closed cockpit would have prevented this.Īnd if the car is upside down and not on fire, the need for a driver to extricate himself rather than wait for the safety team to arrive is irrelevant. Secondly, it tends to be the engine-end of the car that catches light, rather than the cockpit area. One regular argument against fully enclosed cockpits is “What if the car is upside down and on fire? How would the driver escape?” Well, for one thing, such occurrences have become exceedingly rare thanks to progress in fuel cell construction, and the devices that protect them. By transferring the load over the far bigger surface area produced by a closed cockpit which is flush with the rear bodywork, the chances of such a collapse would be massively reduced. But I’m also not sure it’s even reasonable to expect a rollhoop to withstand the huge forces caused by digging into a surface – be it SAFER barrier or pavement – while the rest of the 1600lb car is trying to continue at 200mph. The most frightening aspect of Josef Newgarden’s accident at Texas Motor Speedway was the fact that the rollhoop failed. Something akin to that device, but with its dome reduced in profile and height by use of modern materials and construction techniques, could be faired seamlessly into the rear bodywork.Īnd that sleekness would have a practical purpose too, not only transferring the load applied by any foreign objects trying to enter the cockpit, but also presenting fewer protuberances on the car that could catch against the ground or catchfence. One of the most sexy cars of all time, Gary Gabelich’s Blue Flame Land Speed Record car of 1970, had a fully enclosed cockpit. A design in which a closed cockpit was fully integrated at birth could be made to look very sexy, and wouldn’t need to look as radical as Adrian Newey’s Red Bull X-1 project. In fact, it looks like open-wheel racing’s equivalent of the hideous early Daytona Prototype, which resembled R2D2 sitting on an upturned bathtub.īut remember, those devices are after-market add-ons. And the aeroscreen looks fine from the side, but absurd from head on, its ‘window’ area far too wide for the body. The Halo on the current breed of F1 car looks as out of place as those seemingly huge rollhoops that have been added to ’50s and ’60s open-wheelers for historic racing. And I’ll grant that neither the Halo nor the aeroscreen are visually enticing. The looksįor some, the sheer aesthetics of a covered cockpit will always be a drawback. The fatalities of Justin Wilson and Dan Wheldon, the head injuries incurred by James Hinchcliffe at GP Indy 2014 and Felipe Massa at Hungaroring in 2009, and the lucky escapes by Fernando Alonso at Spa in 2012 and Helio Castroneves on pitlane in Pocono a few weeks ago were instances where the driver’s fate was largely out of his hands. And if the majority of Ind圜ar’s and F1’s recent head injuries and near-misses taught us anything, it’s that those affected are rarely culpable. But it’s therefore only right that the vast majority of those risks should be the responsibility of the drivers. ![]()
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