© Getty ImagesBulls’ Guide To: Car And Driver SafetyIn the latest article in the series we take a look at how the driver is kept safe by their equipment and the car.
Motorsportisdangerous.Itsayssoonthepasseveryoneinthegaragewearsandtheticketissuedtofans.Thechallengeeveryyearistomakeitlessdangerous.That’samulti-layered,andmulti-generationaltaskthatF1hasbecomeverygoodat.
We’re accustomed to seeing drivers waving to the crowd and talking to the press after a 300kph shunt and it becomes so commonplace that, when there is a bad accident it becomes all the more shocking. Those still happen with sufficient frequency to ensure the sport collectively never has the luxury of slipping into complacency.
F1 uses its status to promote an integrated approach to safety. It pushes circuits and kit manufacturers to improve, while constantly tweaking its own rules to ensure safer cars and safer operations. The goal is this multi-layered safety net in which every aspect – car, kit, operation and circuit – work in concert, albeit with each having a unique set of demands. Many areas of safety research go unsung in F1 because, if they work well, they don’t attract attention. This week, we’ll run through a few of them.
The driver’s helmet is F1’s original piece of safety equipment, but over the years it has undergone many advancements. The FIA’s latest helmet standard, 8860-2018, has been mandatory since the start of the 2019 season. The standard doesn’t focus on materials but rather a set of tests each manufacturer’s design needs to pass, covering impact protection, crush protection, ballistics, penetration, mechanical strength of the attachments and fire resistance.
In the aftermath of Felipe Massa’s accident in Hungary (in which his helmet undoubtedly saved his life) the standard was toughened to include a zylon panel at the top of the visor, the current standard has moved the protection inside the helmet and lowered the visor opening. Additionally, the latest standard demands a little bit more contextual protection for the drivers. While the trend continues to have higher and higher velocity tests, the new standard also includes a low velocity impact test – because the materials react differently to low-speed impacts. There’s also a new set of lateral tests, designed to ensure the helmet works in concert with the cockpit surround in the event of a side impact.
Max Tightens His Helmet© Getty Images
Alan van der Merwe, the FIA Medical Car’s driver and Dr Ian Roberts, medical rescue coordinator together invented the biometric gloves F1 drivers now all wear, and set up their own company – Signal Biometrics – to commercialise the technology.
The incident that prompted the creation of the gloves was Carlos Sainz’ crash at the 2015 Russian Grand Prix. With his car embedded in the TecPro barrier, the emergency responders were unable to assess the driver until the debris was cleared. In similar incidents, where the driver is not immediately accessible to the extraction team – upside down in a gravel trap, buried in a tyre conveyor, in the midst of a multi-car pile-up – the data transmitted from the glove allows the medics to assess the driver’s state.
The key tech is an optical sensor measuring pulse oximetry, which transmits data via industrial Bluetooth (which is more robust and operates over larger distances than consumer Bluetooth). It allows the on-site medical team to indirectly monitor the driver’s respiration, and plan their extraction accordingly.
Driver Biometric Gloves© Getty Images
Drivers’ overalls are a complicated challenge. Obviously their primary responsibility is to offer protection against fire but at the same time, the drivers need race suits that are lightweight and able to breathe. This isn’t purely a matter of comfort: the drivers spend a lot of time in their overalls, often in a very hot cockpit or hot ambient conditions: they are at severe risk of fatigue and dehydration, which brings with it a decrease in mental ability, dangerous when making split-second decisions on a busy race track.
The latest protective clothing standard 8856-2018, mandatory for this season, covers all protective clothing, not just overalls (boots, gloves, balaclavas and underwear also has to meet it). It addresses the steady move away from dense materials to lighter, more form-fitting garments, that help the driver shed a few grams. It requires the materials – generally lightweight artificial fibres such as Nomex – to pass a tougher Heat Transfer Index (HTI) test, that includes testing garments when stretched.
Max's HANS Device© Getty Images
In the 20th Century, one all-too-common cause of fatal injury for racing drivers was the basilar skull fracture, in which a collision – usually frontal – breaks one or more of the bones at the base of the skull. The arrival of the Head and Neck Support (HANS) device did away with that class of injury virtually overnight. The device gained FIA approval in 2001, first appeared in F1 in 2002 and became mandatory in 2003.
Skull fractures of the type suffered by Roland Ratzenberger at Imola in 1994 are an unwelcome consequence of wearing a safety harness: in a head-on collision, shoulder belts restrain the torso – but the unrestrained head continues along its path. As the harness pulls the shoulders rearwards and down the neck is stretched. Tension develops between the skull, through the neck, to the shoulders. Something has to give and the base of the skull is the weak point. Under these circumstances, injuries are exacerbated by the presence of a helmet, which adds to the weight of the head and increases the loading between head and shoulders – though it also provides the basis for the HANS solution. Anchor points on the helmet are used to secure tethers, which connect to the HANS collar. This sits under the shoulder belts and spreads load across the torso.
In the event of a frontal collision HANS reduces the forward motion of the head relative to the torso and relieves the strain placed upon the neck. It’s taken the basilar skull fracture out of the equation and has been hailed in many quarters, including senior racing medical professionals, as the best safety device since the seat belt.
Max During FP3 At The Nürburgring© Getty Images
In safety terms, the important part of a Formula One car is the survival cell – known rather more commonly as ‘the tub’ – in which the driver is seated. In the event of an accident, every other part of the car is designed to dissipate energy and protect the tub. The front and rear impact structures are designed to crumple and absorb energy; the engine and gearbox will sheer off, all of which is affording the driver a more orderly deceleration.
Constructed from carbon composite materials the survival cell is very thin, very rigid and extremely light – though not as light as was once the case given the extra mass required to support the Halo, and the recent addition of Zylon anti-intrusion panels designed to prevent cockpit penetration from impacts with nosecones, suspension components or trackside objects. The survival cell also features a fire suppression system that can be triggered by the driver or marshals, and a medical warning light that tells an extraction team if the tub has suffered a heavy impact, and thus specialist care is to be taken when extracting the driver.
Max Lowers Himself Into His RB16B© Getty Images
While survival cells will take damage in a heavy impact, it’s rare that one cannot be salvaged after a thorough NDT examination and rework back at the factory. Even without damage, the team will often cycle through its available survival cells as units are withdrawn from use to go back to the factory to be scraped and repainted – though there are superstitious drivers on the grid who absolutely will not countenance changing ‘their’ tub unless it’s a write-off.
The front and rear crash structures have always been big focal points of the winter because they have to pass their crash tests before the car can run on track. In many walks of life, a safety test is a minimum value that a product is expected to realistically exceed by a healthy margin. It isn’t like that with F1 crash structures, tests are extremely stringent and difficult to pass, and no team wants to do more than squeak through – because that suggests a car that’s over-engineered and heavier than it strictly needs to be.
The nose of the car has been a particularly interesting subject in recent years because the shapes demanded by safety rules are in opposition to those favoured by aerodynamicists. 1990’s Tyrrell 019 was a watershed debut in F1 in that it introduced the concept of the raised nose. By mounting the nose higher, and attaching the front wing to pylons, an increased volume of air could pass under the car and be put to use. The problem with the raised nose is that it creates obvious dangers in a side-impact, and it’s also more susceptible to the ‘launching’ style of accident where one car rides up and over the rear wheel of another. Robert Kubica’s 2007 crash in Montreal and Mark Webber’s big one at Valencia in 2010 being prime examples.
Thus, F1 now has lower nosecones – but with a determination to keep the front of the chassis relatively high, this has resulted in a sequence of aesthetically unpleasing stepped nose designs; then a series of eye-opening long noses, before the rules were tweaked to allow for something relatively inoffensive, much to everyone’s relief.
A New Front Nose Is Carried To The Grid© Getty Images
The seat belts on an F1 car are complex and vaguely wonderous things. The FIA have stringent parameters for the restraints but within those parameters the driver is able to work with the supplier – in our case, a partnership with Sabelt now into its 16th season – to create a bespoke harness.
One of the nice things about having a long-term partnership is the ability to measure progress. The harness is one of the larger components on an F1 car and, like anything else, there’s a constant desire to reduce weight. Sabelt have constantly re-engineered the sturdy 1kg harness from 2005 so that it now weighs around 480g, offering the lightest harness in the world, while meeting even-more rigorous requirements. Take the six straps out of the car and you could hang a double decker bus off them.
Sabelt achieve such impressive feats thanks to them being the only company in its sector to have an internal dynamic test laboratory to perform FIA tests, aimed at verifying the strength and effectiveness of its products. Its close relationship with the FIA is crucial in the development of safety standards: starting from F1 drivers down to amateurs applying the same severe testing and quality parameters.
The six-point harness is fitted so tightly that the driver is not so much buckled-up as retracted into position to become part of the cockpit. Many drivers say that it’s the process of having the belts tightened that puts them in the zone. The driver himself doesn’t have the range of motion required to do the belts up, and thus it’s a job entrusted to a mechanic. In the case of Max, on the grid it’s a job that’s always been done by front-end mechanic Ole Schack.
Depending on the race and the conditions, I strap Max in whenever he’s ready, normally between ten to eight minutes before the race. “Depending on the race and the conditions, I strap Max in whenever he’s ready, normally between ten to eight minutes before the race,” says Ole. “It’s a set piece: everything is done exactly the same way, every race: strap him in, get him comfortable, get the drinks and radio connected, make sure everything in there is correct. I never talk to a driver at that point unless they want to talk to me. Sometimes there’s a bit of a glint in the eye – but it’s their time, not my time, they have to get into their zone. You wouldn’t have a chat with a darts player when he’s about to shoot for treble-top! It’d never work.”
There’s more protection in the cockpit than belts alone. The drivers wear padding on their knees to prevent jarring injuries during an impact, and have a cockpit surround fitted after they are belted-in. The surround is a thin composite shell filled with urethane foam. The foam materials have energy absorption properties that perform better in specific temperature ranges. Thus, the FIA issues an official temperature before each session, and the headrest best suited to that temperature band is fitted. Thus, if the ambient temperature is above 30°C, you’ll see headrest material that is blue; below 30°C and it’s pink (there’s also a light blue foam used on very cold days in winter testing – and at the Nürburgring recently).
Max Heads Out On Track© Getty Images
More controversial than any changes to the front or rear of the car has been addition of the Halo. The Halo has its origins in a number of fatalities and near-misses across the breadth of open-cockpit racing. It is designed to offer protection during car-to-car impacts, car-to-environment impacts and, perhaps most pertinently, foreign object impacts – specifically (but not exclusively) tyres and large pieces of accident debris. It works as a secondary roll-structure, comprising a hoop attached to the shoulders of the safety cell and a strut attached centrally in front of the cockpit opening template.
The tubular titanium structure was created to withstand a 20kg wheel impacting a car with a closing speed of 225kph – but it offers crush protection as well as impact protection. When the Halo was introduced in 2018, the biggest problem for designers was bulking-up the cockpit surrounds on which the Halo is mounted. The homologation tests are severe: you could drop the aforementioned double decker bus out of a second storey window onto the Halo, and the driver beneath would emerge unscathed.
It is inescapably true that many advancements in F1 safety over the years have been informed by tragedy. This is becoming less frequent, though learning from mistakes, albeit the sort of mistakes happily people can walk away from, still forms a large body of research. With that in mind, some of the safety features on a modern F1 car are there to cater not for the crash that’s happening now, but to prevent or mitigate the next one. One feature of the Halo is a high-speed camera pointing at the driver’s head. This records data on an accident data recorder – the car’s ‘black box’, that also contains data from key sensors and – including miniature accelerometers worn by the drivers in their ears.
Of course, the drivers’ equipment and the car’s crash mitigation design are very much the last lines of defence. F1 pours a lot of attention into organisational and circuit safety to ensure that there is more accident prevention than crash mitigation – but that is a subject we’ll take a look in a future article.