Getting rid of walls

[Crash Test]

Oh my God, i have to agree with you there Franklin!!!!
Another thing:
"Nope. Micheal Andretti was the first driver to test the HANS device. Check 7thGear News Tidbits section for a pic."
-Really? And if 7G says he is the first person to use it, they are way wrong. Such devices have been in use for years. I can distinctly remember a local touring car teams having its drivers wear such devices in 1995, after they lost a driver in an accident. Also , shock horror to you Mapguy, drivers in the IRL have also been using them for years as well. Remeber when Cheever won the 500 (1998), he had to pull apart all of the straps which kept his helmet tied to his suit, as Gary Gerould was trying to interview him? No you probably wont, because it was an IRL race...there there...

[Crash Test]

OH be nice....

[Hyacinth]

Franklin-

Nice tap-dance change of subject, but I'm STILL waiting for you to reply to my rebuttal of your theory about stopping spinning cars by using a water hazard.

That IS the subject of this thread, isn't it?

[Crash Test]

OK, well you are not going to get an answer out of Frankie on that one, but i'll have a shot.

The idea of gravel or water traps on a speedway, to be put nicely, is dumb. Your dead right, they would flip, and at that speed the flip would not be pretty.

But my way of thinking is that maybe they could be considered to be tested (in a controled lab) for use on slower cars on road courses. When a car hits a sand trap sideways it flips, no gain there or lose there with the water trap. At slower speeds, if a car angles into the sand it is at its most effective. The problem with flat sand traps, is that it doesn't stop flat bottomed race cars that go straight on. If a flat bottomed race car has a failure, such as brake or stuck throttle, sand traps and plain asphalt are just plain useless. Would water do anything different? There may be some initial skid over the surface, which may scrub off some speed, it would then "sink" and slow. Just a theory.

There would be heaps of questons to be answered, and many problem which would have to addressed, which i stated a few earlier on the thread.

[Lizzerd]

Mr./Ms. Administrator, are you still watching?

[Crash Test]

Oh, and one more thing that makes me think it would be a thing to look at is that there used to be a local track here with an unprotected lake. Of course many cars spun off into it, none of them got to a depth where the driver was in trouble, but gosh, did it stop the cars in a hurry!!

[Franklin]

"Nice tap-dance change of subject, but I'm STILL waiting for you to reply to my rebuttal of your theory about stopping spinning cars by using a water hazard. That IS the subject of this thread, isn't it?"

Actually, NO. That is NOT the subject of the thread, Mr. Attention Deficit Syndrome. The subject of the thread is track architectures that would allow the elimination of retaining walls. (A further reminder to those who may have forgotten that was the subject of this thread. When you eliminate retaining walls that means your focus is slowing the car down, NOT slowing it down quickly before it runs out of room and hits a concrete wall.)

[Liz]

The following was served upon Franklin just a few minutes ago.

"Franklin, if no one else has shown you a Yellow Card yet, may I be the first? As one of the Administrators I must tell you that your continuing name-calling is against the rules, besides being really ill-mannered, and either you will cease and desist right away or you will be banned.

You have one more chance. I would advise you to think carefully before you use it up.

Liz Shaw
Clerk of the Course"


Let's all calm down now and talk about racing, shall we? It IS possible to disagree without being disagreeable, isn't it?

[Dave S]

Gosh Frankie, if you could only sell them on your patented perpetual motion engine & Kevlar tyres we could do away with pit stops altogether. Think how many pit crew would thank you for saving them from danger in the nasty old pit lane.

[Franklin]

"FRANKLIN: ARE YOU ON CRACK??????????!!!!!!"

"Let's all calm down now and talk about racing, shall we? It IS possible
to disagree without being disagreeable, isn't it?" Well, Liz where the hell were you when champcarfan implied I'm a crackhead?

Given your complete LACK OF RESPONSE to champcarfan's implication that I'm a crackhead, why should I not now be considering words like bias, favortism, prejudice, or hypocrisy?

(And when it comes to football, pretty much all of us colonials have no clue what a "yellow card" is although we are familiar with penalty flags. Anything in your rules about penalty flags for bias?)

[This message has been edited by Franklin (edited 04 May 2000).]

[Liz]

Franklin, you are getting on my last nerve with your quibbling. A Yellow Card is exactly the same thing as the yellow segment of the traffic light, as I am sure you already knew. (P.S. I am an American living in Canada. Technically that makes me a "colonial" too, doesn't it? I am educated regarding football rules, even so.)

And you do have a point about Champcarfan's animadversion, and he or she is duly admonished to stop the personal remarks as well.

NOW can we talk about champ car racing?

[This message has been edited by Liz (edited 04 May 2000).]

[Franklin]

Okey dokey.

[jamie928]

Franklin.....I hope you'll get involved in the dicussions now and not just pontificate(sp) to the other members.
People who know your past track record have been waiting for you to get the boot. It's time you chill out and post your tech ideas on the proper forums and talk about current Champcar stuff here.
Crashtest really held back on you cause he plays by the rules here.
Stop being the guy on the outside looking in and join the fun most of us have in these forums and try to enjoy yourself.

[slicktoast]

Yikes! what a ride. I felt like I was in an out of control car spinning through where I could've sworn there was a retaining wall just a second ago & then headed for the Black Lagoon! Thank goodness for the way big dorsal fin and the fishing net. Whew!

[Hyacinth]

Franklin-

It's MS. Attention Deficit DISORDER.

Please correct your records.

[Crash Test]

The problem with making every track like a Cleveland with tons of run off space, is that spectors will quickly become annoyed at the distance between them and the cars. The big sterile race tracks of today just don't do it for the spectators.

It is all a big trade off; what do we want? An ultra safe race track with no spectators, or one with happy spectators and bent vehicles?

There are now two local race tracks in my area. One was opened last year with safety as it's massive selling point; it had everything going for it. However in the past 12 months there have been 12 rolls at the new track, and 1 at the old.

Another trade off with having a lot of run off is that drivers will try harder. When they try harder they often come off, and as they are trying hard it would be at a faster speed. Faster speed=bigger crash.

Have a look at Michael Andrettis crash a few years ago at Mid Ohio, and Carpentier's one at Road America last year as a few examples. They were massive shunts, and luckily they walked away. Neither of them hit walls, but they did hit sand. No matter what there was there, sand, water, air, anything, when a car gets loose at that speed it is going to be a huge stack.

The only way to stop big shunts is to slow the cars down, but as Formula Ford will go to show, big stacks still happen at slow speeds...

[enzo]

I've been standing back & watching this one develop for awhile with amusement - it's amasing how Frankie is able to bring in totally irrelevent factoids & present them as if they were really relevent. ( Actually, I've been on the road testing & couldn't get a posting connection for some reason )

But in Frankie's defence, I've got to agree with his original thread - removal of walls. It is extremely obvious that if walls aren't there to hit at full bore, the likelyhood of injuries is decreased rather dramatically. The problem lies in what to use to replace them with.

Water traps will slow a car down very nicely - except if it is sideways, and then it is not so nice - but the thermal shock to all the various hot parts will be rather destructive. You could expect probably about $1.5 million worth of damage on the average CART car, & even more on an F1. ( The engine is the biggest contributer to this price tag ). If the water is only about 2 inces deep, this may not be such a problem, but I have no idea how effective such a shallow depth would be.

Sand traps can work if sculpted properly, but can also be dangerous to a sideways car. Flat bottomed cars also have a tendancy to just skip across like a flat rock across water, even on the traps that are highly sculpted.

Nets can be extremely effective without being destructive at all. The problen lies in extracating the car in a reasonable amount of time, and ensuring that the driver doesn't get wrapped up such that he can't escape a burning car. Replacing the nets in a reasonable timeframe is also a big problem.

The only solution that can be implemented that will allow plenty of stopping room that doesn't have a ton of drawbacks is great expanses of asphalt. Cleveland is a great example.
The main problem here is how to incorperate this into existing facilities. It simply can't be done without costing so much that the facility is no longer viable. Brand new facilities may be another story, such as raising the grandstands and allowing te runoff room to be underneith them, but the insurance companies would go berserk at the thought of a burning car being parked under a grandstand full of people!
This leaves us with only one viable solution - energy absorbing walls.

That subject was hacked to death elsewhere.

[Green_man4421]

Tyres work in F1 but CART is diffrent they won't work their will they??

Liz so you are that Mysterious cleark of the Course administrater person that does all of the dirty work round here?

So u are a clone so their is two of you. Nah that is just a person any moderator/ Senior moderator can use right?

[Franklin]

So, Enzo, you've never heard of SPRINKLER systems? You know, those little inverted mushrooms you see in the ceilings of office buildings?

[Crash Test]

There would be a few things that would need to be done...
1. The height of the grandstand would have to be high, in case the thing rolls.
2. There would have to be something very solid between the run off and the grandstand to stop heat/fumes from penetrating the spectator area.
3. They would have to be pretty darn strong sprinklers...
4. Once again, would there be any track owner in the world who could afford all this?

[Liz]

Brett, if you take a peek at the bottom of this thread (or any thread) you will see that the current Administrators are Gerard, Invader, KC and I. Any of us can and will and indeed are taxed with the responsibility of keeping things from deteriorating into a flaming match or a hockey game.

I like the whole setup just the way it is, so have no more to add about walls.

[enzo]

Frankie : Yes, I've heard of sprinklers. The only problem is that water isn't what you want for an oil or gasoline fire, and a real no-no for magnesium. Yes, a foam system could possibly be used, but would have to have the provision of site selection ( limited area foaming) to be any good. Also, just randomly dumping on a lot of foam doesn' cut it. One of my best friends, who happens to be in risk analysis for an insurance company that insures most of the tracks in this country, and I talked at length about this some years ago. Believe me when I say that the insurance companies are paranoid about that scenario !

The next problem with raising the grandstands is the structural requrements if there are to be no posts for a depth of say 50-75 ft or so. Not a real problem from the design & construction standpoint, but a real problem from the cost stance. Expect the cost of a grandstand to double, if not triple. I doubt that any track owner will want to go to that extreme.

The other problem with trying to use watertraps is that on an oval, the track is usually banked all the way around. As water refuses to cling to a sloped surface, this means that any car leaving the track will fly through the air for some distance, and the big problem being that the greater the banking at the point of exit, the greater the flight distance, and the higher the stands have to be for the car to clear. All in all, not very practical, or effective !

Sorry to say, your idea has very little chance of ever being implemented, so we are left with energy absorbing walls, or large expanses of concrete.

C'est la vie !

[Franklin]

Enzo, considering you're the guy who thought Nemesis was built on a budget of $1,000,000 instead of the actual budget of $25,000 I'm wondering how much credibility to give a flat statement that suspended grandstands would have two to three times the cost of conventional grandstands.

And exactly why would flying through the air for a distance before landing in a trap (gravel,water, whatever) be as bad or worse than slamming into a wall at a closing speed of 60 to 100 mph? (When Art Arfons survived at 600+ mph the fastest crash in the history of motorsports -- with just scrapes and bruises -- his car traveled 527 feet on the first bounce.)

[Crash Test]

Well Franklin, i have seen cars get aribourne when they leave the circuit, and in favct i came within a couple of feet of being cleaned up by one. The problem is that the cars don't slow down in the air, and the driver flapping his arms isn't going to help steer the car.

Well why not you give us proof of how cheap they are?

(Hang on, did i just ask Franklin to prove one of his ideas? Am i on drugs? Do i think i am going to get a response without me being called a bad spelar??)

Go on Franklin, prove us wrong for a change

[TimD]

Three words....

"Wild" Bill Vukovich.