Next Steps In Safety

[Hoffman900]

Contrast this


To this (reported to be 107gs)

[Just_a_fan]

Rutherford was lucky as it appears he hit rear three quarters first rather than head on or squarely side on. Either of the latter two would have been very much worse - possibly fatal. It obviously shredded itself during the subsequent journey along the top wall.

Bourdais's accident reminded my of Kubica's in Canada. That was head on at about 45 degrees to the wall and moved one of the concrete sections used to form the wall. He was very lucky not to lose his feet. In both the car carried on for a good distance losing the remaining energy. In either case, a full stop would have surely been fatal. Interestingly, I think Bourdais suffered a significant injury in his impact (fractured pelvis or leg?) where Kubica got away with no significant injury. Kubica's impact was about 75g so there's a big difference there. Kubica's car also had some time to slow a bit between leaving the track and hitting the wall which would have helped enormously. That's probably what saved Kubica.

Also of interest is how short the nose cone of the Indy car is. After the impact, there's only a small piece missing. In F1, the whole nose cone acts as a crash structure. I wonder whether Bourdais would have fared better with a longer crushable nose cone to absorb some of the energy and reduce the g-loading on him.

[i70q7m7ghw]

They've added tyres and a belt for this weekend, I guess as a "best we can do for now" solution:

[smellybeard]

What about sacks or boxes of something like pumice as a deformable and easily replace barrier? Perhaps as one layer in a composite.

[Jolle]

What about sacks or boxes of something like pumice as a deformable and easily replace barrier? Perhaps as one layer in a composite.

It's all about distance. So for that point, impact speed is around 220 km/h, which means at least 2-2.5 meters of deformable barrier for a 800kg object.

[smellybeard]

What about sacks or boxes of something like pumice as a deformable and easily replace barrier? Perhaps as one layer in a composite.

It's all about distance. So for that point, impact speed is around 220 km/h, which means at least 2-2.5 meters of deformable barrier for a 800kg object.

It's all about lots of things. I've suggested a general concept of a crushable but massive material using the combination of progressive addition of mass and deformation as a retardation mechanism. I'm surprised that you can think of applying it to a specific barrier on a specific track so quickly. I believe the discussion title is just "Next Steps In Safety".

Go easy on the assumptions.

[Just_a_fan]

FIA report on Grosjean's accident:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/56296858

https://www.fia.com/news/fia-concludes- ... d-prix-and

Impact was slightly slower than originally stated but impact acceleration was notably higher at 67G.

[notsofast]

Ho hum. I would have expected to see a bit more in terms of root cause analysis, rather than simply a description of what happened.