F1 Fanatic

Motor racing was, is and always will be dangerous. Human beings weren’t designed to sit in lumps of metal and plastic accelerate to 200+ mph and then crash. The men who love this sport, dedicate and risk their lives doing it are fully aware of the dangers.
I am all for improved safety and am delighted to be living in a time where motorsport deaths, with tragic exceptions, are few and far between compared to previous decades.
My problem with closed cockpits is that I fear that some intangible, innate aspect of F1 will be lost should they be implemented.
If it irrefutably will save lives then that’s not much of a point, but if the improvements are absolutely miniscule and come with other problems then I’d rather not change this aspect of the sport.

The attraction of F1 is that it’s the pinnacle of open wheeled and open cockpit racing. What next? Closed wheel? How ridiculous.

Indy is just not as safe as F1, easy to see why when you have oval tracks with walls on the outside and so many cars. If one of the front runners ends up in the wall they have no place else to go but into the path of the 30 something cars following.

The issue with Wheldon’s accident was the catch fencing around the track.

They couldn’t exactly remove the catch fencing, could they? If they did, Wheldon would have gone over the edge and landed on the outisde of the circuit perimeter – and there’s no telling where he might have ended up, only that it would have been a long fall.

I think @prisoner-monkeys is right here, about canopies not being the adequate solution to this accident.

Canopies do offer a solution to better protect the drivers in open wheel cars but there are some risks and disadvantages (just look at the arguments Keith posted in 2009). The FIA has been studying what effects they have because of the accidents in 2009, and in time it might be that cars will have something like that.

But if you look at the sheer force that ripped off the whole air box of Wheldons car, can we be sure even a canopy would have offered sufficient protection? What’s more important, is looking at extreme measures the best solution? In the end it only changes the danger as a results of the crash, instead of preventing this from happening in the first place.

The new Indy car chassis was develloped to limit wheels mingling and cars launching up in the air. And driver protection is a lot better as well. It might well be, that with that car Wheldon would have not been shot in the air and therefor would not have been in danger of getting into the catch fencing in the first place.
I am sure Dallara will test the new car and simulate the crash to see if it would really prevent this from happening, as it was designed to do.

But before even getting into the new car, Indy Car will have to look at the wisdom of racing on this type of oval, with a large and increasing banking. And they will have to consider how many cars to put into such a close space of 1.5 miles.

The track itself might be improved as well. At the scene of the accident it was a catch fencing with barbed wire. If you look at other parts of the track, there is mesh fencing which might not have ripped up the car as much. Not saying it should have been that way, but these are far easier measures than putting a canopy on top of the car.

I’ve not said at anypoint that a canopy would definatley have saved Dan Wheldon, although, although I’m not sure another layer of high strength protection wouldn’t have helped dissipate some of the forces that killed him, nor has anyone got any evidence that this isn’t the case.

A canpoy would however have saved Henry Surtees and Felipe Massa, in a high impact situation, or in a situation where things detatch from cars, the risk of head impacts are not neglible enough in my opinion for the idea of canopys to be ignore’d.

The sport has moved on to the point were Canopy’s wouldn’t really increase risk in the vast majority situations, especially as, you would have to assume the technology would be installed with the covering to remove it as quickly as possible.

On the nature of the sport I’m saying not necessarily, imagine if, through Canopys, we could see more of the drivers face and maybe even body? Wouldn’t that be just as good as seeing a head wrapped in a cubic meter of plastic and their hands. Maybe not, but I’m just saying it won’t kill the sport stone dead. It might even improve it, and as the FIA and drivers appear to be testing the theory and practice so thorughly that if we do get Cannopy’s it’ll be because lots of people with the sport and the knowledge to make such judgements will have decided it’s for the best.

I’m not against the idea of canopies, and if the FIA think they’re necessary on safety grounds then fair enough, but like many others the biggest issue I can see with them is that they could potentially stop or hinder a driver getting out of the car. There’s also the danger that a canopy could be crushed or disintegrate onto the driver, increasing the risk of injury to the driver.

However, I’m sure that if the FIA decide that canopies are the way to go, they’ll be rigorously tested to make sure they don’t pose any additional risk.

Would canopies be afordable for all classes of single seater open wheel sports cars. The only figure I have seen suggests an F15 canopy costs $350,000 and they have to be replaced fairly frequently. I also assume that damage, it the way of scratches and chips, which in some cases can be polished out, would be greater in a single seater than an aircraft. Simply because they are so close to the ground and there has to quite a lot of stones kicked up especially at tracks with gravel traps.