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How long until F1 becomes a closed-cockpit formula? (32 posts)

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Tom said 10 months, 3 weeks ago:

Didn’t a car end up on top of Schumacher’s in 2010, with a wheel nearly hitting his head?

Helmet protection can’t really cover such a neck-snapping injury – so yes, I think head impact protection is certainly on the way.

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Prisoner Monkeys said 10 months, 3 weeks ago:

Surtees, Massa, Wheldon, de Villota. Four high profile incidents which all resulted in either serious injuries or loss of life due to severe blows to the head. Each occurring to drivers in open cockpit single-seaters.

Surtees, Massa, Wheldon, de Villota. Four freak accidents that have people rushing to claim that Formula 1 needs to introduce closed canopies over the cockpits. It’s nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction.

For every accident where something does happen, there are plenty of accidents where cars and helmets do their jobs and the drivers walk away unscathed – like Coulthard and Wurz in Melbourne in 2007, when the high side of Wurz’s car prevented Coulthard from hitting him. Or the Schumacher-Liuzzi crash at Abu Dhabi in 2010, where the design of the car prevented Schumacher from taking a face full of Force India.

There are always going to be outliers, extreme incidents that demonstrate just how dangerous motorsport is and how teams and drivers cannot afford to get complacent about it. Closed canopies might protect the driver, but they will also create more problems than they solve. What happens when a driver is trapped in the car and the canopy is jammed shut? Sure, it would take a freak accident for that to happen, but the Surtees, Massa, Wheldon and de Villota accidents were all freak occurances. If Felipe Massa can be invovled in an accident where a spring falling off a car in front of him hits him in the head, then surely he can be involved in an accident where the cockpit of the car deforms enough to prevent the canopy from opening.

These claims that impact protection are necessary are nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction. Maria de Villota’s accident is not a case for a closed canopy being introduced. It’s a case for teams reviewing their testing procedures and parking the team transporter somewhere else.

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raymondu999 said 10 months, 3 weeks ago:

I’m with @prisoner-monkeys on this one. We need to analyse really what good, and bad, the canopy brings functionally. When it comes to such matters of safety aesthetics and “tradition” should not be given much weight IMO.

Whilst a canopy would stop stray items hitting the driver on the head, and protect the driver’s head, a canopy also will do quite a bit of hurt. What if the canopy latch gets stuck, and the engine is about to go? What if the engine is about to go kapoof, but the driver is stuck because his car is upside down, and so by extension unable to open the cockpit?

It’s not a clear-cut situation.

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Prisoner Monkeys said 10 months, 3 weeks ago:

It always boggles the mind when these threads are either created or revived as soon as an accident has taken place, but the people posting in them claim it’s not a knee-jerk reaction at all. Nobody cares about it until an accident, and then everyone suddenly cares about it.

The truth is that these accidents are immensely complex, and there is no simple solution to them. When Jacques Villeneuve and Ralf Schumcher collided in Melbourne a few years ago and a marshall died, the death was the result of a 47cm tyre travelling through a 48cm gap in the wall. If you had changed one of the variables in the accident – if Villeneuve had been ten centimetres to the right of where he was at the time of the accident, or if Scumacher had been travelling five kilometres per hour faster – than the entire outcome of the accident would have changed. The same can be said of the Massa, Surtees and Wheldon accidents (though not so much de Villota’s; like I said, that could have been easily fixed by parking the transporter somewhere else). This proves that ultimately, canopies will do nothing. They are not the magic bullet that people think they are, because there will still be a very precise set of circumstances – a combination of mass, speed, angle, and so on and so forth – that will render them utterly useless, if not dangerous for the driver. In the wake of Henry Surtees’ accident, wheel tethers were strengthened and a third tether was added. And yet, as we saw in the Suranovich-Daly crash at Monaco, the wheels can still be torn free. It’s a question of physics. The wrong amount of force in the wrong place at the wrong time will always negate whatever safety measures you put in place – and you cannot plan for them until they actually happen.

To build on the point raised by @raymondu999, here is a video of an accident at Monaco in the GP3 race this year involving Alex Brundle and William Buller:

What, exactly, would a cockpit canopy have done for Buller here, except hamper rescue and recovery efforts?

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the_sigman said 10 months, 3 weeks ago:

What, exactly, would a cockpit canopy have done for Buller here, except hamper rescue and recovery efforts?

Maybe the canopy could be removed easiily by a screwdriver.

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Prisoner Monkeys said 10 months, 3 weeks ago:

No, it couldn’t be easily removed. But you’d probably need to undo a dozen screws to get in. And in the event of an accident like the William Buller one I posted above, the screws would likely be the first thing to become deformed by the force of impact, making it impossible to remove the canopy at all.

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duncanmonza said 10 months, 3 weeks ago:

I actually think that exposed tyres are more dangerous than exposed helmets.

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Prisoner Monkeys said 10 months, 3 weeks ago:

Well, let’s cover them up, too.

Hey, maybe we can finally get Audi into Formula 1. They already have the car.

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Girts said 10 months, 3 weeks ago:

As a fan, I’m pretty conservative so I think it would take me some time to get used to canopies if they were introduced. But that’s not a good argument against them if we’re talking about safety.

We have now seen too many accidents to postpone looking for solutions for protection of drivers against flying objects and other dangers created by the open cockpit further. The issue needs to be addressed immediately and it needs to be taken very seriously. It doesn’t mean hasty decisions and knee-jerk reactions. If experts conclude that canopies cause more new potential dangers than they erase the existing ones, then they’re not the way to go but it doesn’t mean we should pretend that nothing could be done to prevent De Villota’s and Massa’s accidents.

It’s obvious that motorsports will never be 100% safe and there will always exist some certain sets of circumstances that can lead to injuries or even death. However, if the fact that it’s impossible to protect the driver against every possible situation would have served as an excuse not to improve safety in the past, then safety standards would still be on 1950s level. Farina, Fangio, Gonzalez and many other drivers luckily survived all the accidents during their careers so why bother saving those who are simply ‘unlucky’?

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Prisoner Monkeys said 10 months, 3 weeks ago:

it doesn’t mean we should pretend that nothing could be done to prevent De Villota’s and Massa’s accidents

Take de Villota’s accident, for instance: what would be the most practical solution to preventing it from happening again?

Would it be a) installing canopies on all Formula 1 cars?

OR

Would it be b) moving the team transporter somewhere else?

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Mads said 10 months, 3 weeks ago:

I actually don’t think its too hard to make a canopy that can easily be removed.
It has been done for ages on jet fighters. Of cause the canopy shouldn’t rocket into the air and fall down on spectators and what not, but an emergency escape where the driver pulls a strap, lever etc. and then the canopy is simply blown off the hinges so it can be either pushed off by him, or lifted off by the safety crews around.
Also an “eject” mechanism should be added to the outside, in case the driver in unconscious.
Of cause there would still be issues where the car is partly upside down, and that should of cause be looked at thoroughly and maybe changing the dimensions of the roll hoop could prevent the car from resting on the canopy.

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S.J.M said 10 months, 3 weeks ago:

@prisoner-monkeys exactly, like I pointed out in an earlier reply, when exactly are we going to see trucks left out in the pits during a gp weekend. If anything this whole affair will lead to more stringent rules for teams when they go on these private tests. If it happened on a GP weekend then yes, answers should be given as to why, but when was the last time we’ve seen any vehicle (other then a safety car) in the pits when the cars are active?

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Keith Collantine said 10 months, 3 weeks ago:

I wrote a piece on this three years ago Henry Surtees was killed and my view hasn’t changed much since then – I think this addresses several of the points above:

Closed cockpits aren’t a perfect solution – but they may be an improvement

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Karthikeyan said 10 months, 3 weeks ago:

I’m with PM on these proposed suggestions. Agreed changes are needed, but their implementation will cause even complex issues. And a F1 race cannot be used a test bed for what failures that may occur in a real race situation unlike a crash test where the tests are performed n a controlled environment.
While a roll hoop will not prevent a piece of debris from hitting the driver a canopy will obstruct a driver’s exit in case of emergency. Consider the Ricciardo and Caterham accident in Valencia where a not so fast side impact almost toppled Ricciardo’s car. And every time a car topples we will have a helpless driver at the mercy of flags and fellow drivers. Also the option of having a safety switch to open the canopy from the outside doesn’t protect the driver, in case of an accident in which the switch itself gets hit, worst damaged and doesn’t function or accidentally opening the canopy midrace.

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MazdaChris said 10 months, 2 weeks ago:

This is a pretty complex issue, and one which doesn’t have a simple answer. With regards to knee jerk reactions, it’s worth pointing out that this is at least the third time in recent memory that this question has come up, where there has been an incident where a close canopy or cockpit would have given a radically better outcome to an accident. That in itself suggests to me that it’s a question which needs taking seriously. Of course we could say, sure, move that truck further away, improve that catch fencing. These things should be done too. But what it highlights is exactly how exposed the driver’s head is, in an open-cockpitted racing car. Lots of isolated incidents, all with their own causes, and all with their own distinct means of avoiding that particular ‘one in a million’ accident. But all with the common factor of severe head injury, or injuries caused by impacts to the head.

If we ignore the debate about aesthetics for a second. The post-2009 rules have generated pig-ugly cars anyway, so I hardly think that aesthetic arguments are valid. And if we wanted something traditional then why not go back to the days of driving cigar tubes on wheels?

The biggest argument against a closed cockpit is the one of driver extraction when the car is inverted. It’s worth looking to the world of Le Mans prototypes here, and asking how often has this caused a problem for them? While a jet-fighter style canopy has its own potential problems, I can’t see why you couldn’t have an LMP style cockpit, with hinged doors which extend into the sidepods. The tight sides of existing head protective areas wouldn’t be needed with a closed canopy, meaning the driver would have a lot more freedom of movement in the cockpit, to get a hand to a doorhandle. Equally, the door would be easy for marshals to open up, and access to the driver would be improved for the most part. If you wanted to significantly improve access, then you could also relocated the air intake to the tops of the sidepods to allow access to all sides of the driver. In this way, you would actually have better access to a driver in an inverted car than you would if there was no canopy. It’s easy to forget that there is a fear on tracks with gravel traps, that the driver’s head could be buried. And instances where cars have speared through a tyre wall, trapping the driver and making it impossible to extract them until the car is moved. These problems, as well as the larger ones, would all be solved by an LMP style cockpit.

There’s another argument in favour of it as well, and that’s one of aerodynamics. The driver is probably the second biggest problem, aerodynamically, after the tyres. Changing this would force the designers to go back to the drawing board and work on making cars which are radically different in their aero concepts than the cars we see at the moment. With much less dirty air, making the racing even better. Closed cockpits could be looked back upon as one of the best things that ever happened to F1 racing, if people were brave enough to allow for radical designs.

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