Driver safety and component failures

[autogyro]

If our conclusions are correct, just tightening the wheel nuts better will not be enough to prevent the nuts coming loose when subject to loads.

[WhiteBlue]

If our conclusions are correct, just tightening the wheel nuts better will not be enough to prevent the nuts coming loose when subject to loads.

Yep, I think the team bosses are using the ostrich strategy. Head in the sand while the drivers put the pedal to the metal with unsafe cars.

[marcush.]

to me ,the basic layout is quite obviously at fault in F1.
They do have a quite big hub carrying the whole Wheel assembly .Why not put a hydraulic unit inside the hub and let this provide/ add to the clamping force?So as you screw on the nut the Hub face extends to the wheel and as you release the wheelgun the tyre is locked... along the lines of a hydraulic Vise .
This would enable you not to rely on brute power to lock the wheel ..and a proper hose pressure as you would basically just turn the nut on providing the clamping force.releasing the Gun would lock the mechanism.Heat will go up and expand the medium ...so clamping force increases with added loads.

[WhiteBlue]

I must say that I'm a bit concerned about Alonso's P3 accident in Monaco yesterday.



The front wheel was sheared off and trapped between the tub and the Armco.



The impact was pretty shallow as we can see from this pic prior to the crash.



The carbon fibre skin of the tub is damaged and the structural integrity of the tub compromised.

I think it was an unlucky situation because I touched the wall at 90km/h and I broke the chassis. I think if I crash 100 times, 99 I will never break the chassis, but this time it happened.

Alonso supplied the information that he was traveling at 90 km/h at the time of impact. Obviously only the full sideway component of impact force would have a damage potential in that case. So let us assume that the actual angle reduced the impact force to 20% of what could have happened in a true T-boning case. The car in FP3 probably had 650 kg of mass including the driver. Rated at 20% we would have 130 kg equivalent mass. So we can say that a T-boning accident with a mass of 130 kg travelling at 90 KM/h is sufficient to write off a tub.

Let us further assume that the inner carbon fibre layer of the sandwich wasn't penetrated and that the mass for penetration of this would have been twice the equivalent mass of the Monaco incident. This leads us to the conclusion that a car or object traveling in vertical direction to the driver safety cell with a mass of 260 kg and a speed of 90 km/h will hurt the driver.

I think that is a scary thought. It appears to me that current F1 cars have practically no real protection against accidents in a T-boning scenario. I can imagine start crashes where cars with 700 kg mass can ram a practically unprotected tub at 200 km/h. What do you guys think about this?

[Just_a_fan]

The regs require the tub to include 'armour plating' in specific side areas to protect against t-boning accidents but I'm not sure (without looking up the regs) how far this extends forwards.

As to your suggested loads actually being applied in Alonso's accident - it's all guess work and no conclusion can be drawn from it. It might just have been an unlucky impact in the exact spot on that tub design where there was a slight weakness (and a local weakness will take nearly all of the damage in such a situation) or it might be indicative of a real problem in F1. Only Ferrari will be able to assess that.

Currently the side impact tests don't load the chassis that far forward so the car won't be designed to take high lateral impacts in that area.