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Originally Posted by Déjà Bru
EDIT: That extension, does it double as an engine air intake?
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Yes.
Btw that car has a Google Street View camera on top because it looks like Brad Pitt's car from that highly annoying F1 movie.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Déjà Bru
EDIT 2: Wow, that halo device has not been around for very long. Early development was spurred by "In 2009, 2 major accidents happened in top level FIA open wheel series, the fatal accident of Henry Surtees at the Brands Hatch round of the 2009 Formula 2 season and the accident Felipe Massa sustained during qualifying at the 2009 Hungarian Grand Prix. The accidents led to calls for additional cockpit protection". It has been in general use only since around 2017.
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First, I'm not gonna link to videos of fatal accidents; I have watched all the instances I am mentioning now, but some might not want to do so. If you do want to see them, Youtube is your oyster.
Henry Surtees (son of John Surtees, the only man in history to win world championships on two and on four wheels) took a bouncing wheel to the head that was torn off from another car that had crashed ahead of him.
Felipe Massa was a championship contender in the late 2000s (he was infamously world champion for 30 seconds at Interlagos in 2008, but "is that Glock???" ...
...) but was never the same after taking a spring that had fallen off another car to the head at speed. The spring broke his helmet and caused extensive skull fractures. He recovered after emergency surgery and drove in F1 for another six or seven years, but the edge was gone.
There are two more fatal accidents that sparked development into the systems that F1 and Indycar use these days (although Indycar uses a different system with an actual windscreen).
The first was the fatal accident of Jules Bianchi at the 2014 Japanese GP. Run in very wet conditions, the race saw Bianchi go off at a corner where the lap before Adrian Sutil had already crashed his car. A heavy tractor was out in the gravel trap at the edge of the track to recover the Sutil car when Bianchi went out of control and crashed at speed into the raised rear end of the tractor in a way that the front of his car went underneath and he struck the underside of the tractor with his head. Mortally wounded, he remained comatose for nine months before passing away. Noteworthy, the accident was not caught live on the world feed and was never shown on replay. The only footage that exists of the Bianchi car striking the tractor is from amateur videos taken of fans seated in the grandstands, filming over the top of the pit buildings.
The other was in Indycar, where Justin Wilson was killed in a race at Pocono. Another car crashed ahead of him, and he also took a loose spring off the head with such force that the live footage shows the spring flying at least 50 feet high into the air afterwards. That was in 2015.
I don't know exactly why Indycar went with a different system, but undoubtedly their screen presents better protection against small-ish debris flying around after an accident.
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Of course, all those kids don't know what they're doing.
Martin Brundle took a whole Benetton-Ford off the head at Interlagos in 1994 and walked away from it!
