F2: Henry Surtees dies in terrifying accident

[dumrick]

Why doesn't anyone really thinks about how unsafe the layout of racing cars with exposed wheels and open cockpits is? A strong canopy with an ejection mechanism would reduce the risk greatly. Furthermore, racing with wheels exposed isn't fuel effective, brings added risks and isn't road relevant.
Tradition dictates that the origin of formula cars goes back to the pre-WWII days, but does it really makes sense still?

[Belatti]

Why doesn't anyone really thinks about how unsafe the layout of racing cars with exposed wheels and open cockpits is? A strong canopy with an ejection mechanism would reduce the risk greatly. Furthermore, racing with wheels exposed isn't fuel effective, brings added risks and isn't road relevant.
Tradition dictates that the origin of formula cars goes back to the pre-WWII days, but does it really makes sense still?

Open wheelers made sense when the cars where low speed, so drag was not important but low weight and inertia moment yes. I bet that with a fixed engine power, lets say 700HP and no other rules, the fastest car would not be an open wheeler. So no, they dont make sense still, but I love them, you love them, we all love them and even Henry Surtees loved them. We all know the risks, some accept them and some doesnt. Thankfully others work hard to try to minimize them.

But finally, my heroes are still guys like Gilles Villeneuve or this man Burt Munro, wich I didnt know who he was till I watch the movie 'World's Fastest Indian' yesterday.

[WhiteBlue]

I see where you are coming from WhiteBlue but the fact of the matter is that a wheel struck the driver on the head.

The Brands track cannot have larger run off due to the protection of the local forests/trees. The circuit won the right to host F1 again in the late 90's but was not able to develop the track and so it went to Silverstone.

Thanks for adressing the issue here. So we have a bunch of tree huggers preventing appropriate modern track safety? It is the curse of democracy that it is easier to prevent something being done than get something done.

If they want to keep racing at Brands Hatch they should bring the track up to scratch and plant replacement trees else where in that ground.

[modbaraban]

If they want to keep racing at Brands Hatch they should bring the track up to scratch and plant replacement trees else where in that ground.

What would be the point? If you want a better looking Mona Lisa just think of buying a poster of Kiera Knightly or something, and leave the painting alone. Brands Hatch is safe enough and if Bernie desn't want to bring F1 there, then so be it.
Clarke could have spun off into the pitwall in Bahrain and lose a wheel. Would you still blame the trees?

[WhiteBlue]

Clarke could have spun off into the pitwall in Bahrain and lose a wheel. Would you still blame the trees?

He didn't and if someone did there would be no complaint. The pit wall at Bahrain is state of the art and an accident there cannot be blamed on the lack of track safety. So why don't we keep the discussion on topic, which is Henry Surtees's accident at Brands Hatch.

[dumrick]

So no, they dont make sense still, but I love them, you love them, we all love them and even Henry Surtees loved them. We all know the risks, some accept them and some doesnt. Thankfully others work hard to try to minimize them.

Well, I don't know what you guys love, but I love automotive racing, be it F1, classic cars, WTCC or ALMS. I don't love single seaters JUST BECAUSE they have open cockpits.

In the aftermath of this accident, I've already read here and there people reacting to the possibility of closing cockpits in the most virulent way. Here at F1Tech, the discussion is getting more and more surrealistic as if any track in the world could avoid flying cars, wheels or objects from impacting the driver's head and killing him.

What I really don't love is a sport where, besides the obvious risks involved, such evident safety flaws aren't adressed and are ignored. What I don't love is seeing Henry Surtees dead in a moving racing car or Tom Pryce decapitated in the main straight of Kyalami.

[WhiteBlue]

Here at F1Tech, the discussion is getting more and more surrealistic as if any track in the world could avoid flying cars, wheels or objects from impacting the driver's head and killing him.

I think you have the wrong view of safety here. Improving safety means you eliminate obvious risks which take reasonable resources to fix. Then there will always be residual risks that cannot be avoided. People will have to live with those and are willing to.

The other thing is to ban open wheel racing. There are enough sports car races for people to look at. They want open wheel racing. You could as well ban motor cycle racing or legislate three wheels and a closed cockpit for MotoGP.

[modbaraban]

Clarke could have spun off into the pitwall in Bahrain and lose a wheel. Would you still blame the trees?

He didn't and if someone did there would be no complaint. The pit wall at Bahrain is state of the art and an accident there cannot be blamed on the lack of track safety. So why don't we keep the discussion on topic, which is Henry Surtees's accident at Brands Hatch.

That's not an argument. The fact is that you can spin out of the last corner and hit the pitwall in any track so your mosley-praising-brands-hatch-blaming tirade is just that.

[timbo]

What has Mr. Mosley to do with that? The cars are as safe as F1 cars.

Sure?
Why they lose wheels so easily?
What material are suspension arms?
Many folks argued that metal arms are cheaper but I firmly believe that carbon arms absorb energy much better and even if wheel is lost it won't carry as much energy.

[dumrick]

The other thing is to ban open wheel racing.

Where have I said anything about banning open wheel racing? I said I find the concept irrelevant, but its danger can be tackled (the IRL is looking for a bumper system behind the rear wheels, to avoid wheel contact, just to give you an example).

Open wheels have nothing to do with the rulemakers forcing the head of the drivers to be exposed "because that's tradition". Safety belts are not traditional also.

[WhiteBlue]

What has Mr. Mosley to do with that? The cars are as safe as F1 cars.

Sure?
Why they lose wheels so easily?
What material are suspension arms?
Many folks argued that metal arms are cheaper but I firmly believe that carbon arms absorb energy much better and even if wheel is lost it won't carry as much energy.

Read the source with the Palmer interview I posted. The F2 design is exactly the same as F1. So it is carbon and same tethering spec.

F1 cars also loose wheels if the impact energy is high enough.

[timbo]

Read the source with the Palmer interview I posted. The F2 design is exactly the same as F1. So it is carbon and same tethering spec.

F1 cars also loose wheels if the impact energy is high enough.

There's something that looks wrong on the footage of crash. F1 cars lose wheels when they are more or less disintegrate. On both crashes from the Surtees accident footage they only lost their rear wings while bodywork are almost intact.
My guess that bodywork was designed with repair-ease in mind.

[alelanza]

..You don't know at what speed that tyre came back into the track, you don't know how it came loose, you don't know how much energy the barrier absorbed.
In a freak accident like that one, slowing the car down, having bigger run offs, barriers that absorb more energy, might have meant the tyre would have simply hit someone else that was behind Mr. Surtees. In fact, all other things constant, imagine that run off would have been 1m shorter, then the tyre would have just missed him. Or maybe not, you just don't know...

You do not listen! It is a fact that better track safety could have prevented the debris of Clarke's accident from getting back on track.

If it's a fact, go ahead prove it. Like I said, remove 1m of run off in that track and we wouldn't be typing any of this. A 1m 'less safe' in your view track would have "prevented" the accident. Hope you can understand that as it's simple geometry.

That is what run offs and gravel beds are designed to do. But when they are not present where needed they cannot do the job. There is no secret to good safety design. Compare Istanbul and Brands Hatch

Again, this could happen and has happened in any of the F1 tracks, the main difference is no one was in the wrong spot at the wrong time, thus the term freak accident.

The speeds and trajectories are known

You may want to re-think that, speeds and trajectories here are nearly infinite. While you more or less can predict where a car will run off to, and add corresponding run offs and the like, it's very difficult to predict the trajectory and speed of a bouncing tyre. Recently I dropped a cup of coffee from a 1.2m counter top, after hitting the floor almost half of the now broken cup bounced all the way back up to where it was before i pushed it. I doubt anyone could have predicted that... I for one was surprised to see half of my mess come back to its original location (had it been made of rubber I would have been less surprised, but it was ceramic)

What is your point? Other accidents have other circumstances. What do they have to do with my statement of fact of this particular tragedy. This accident could have been avoided. You cannot deny it.

What does 'statement of fact' mean to you? I asked you a few questions, that were essential for you to be able to tell what was needed to avoid this accident, yet you answered none. If you can't answer them, then you simply don't know, that's my point and it's up to you to disprove it

What a rude and condescending way of discussing a serious issue. The young Surtees died and all I'm doing here is discussing ways of preventing such tragic loss of life.

Seeing as how you are simply repeating yourself, i was hoping that by upping the tone here you would snap out of that cycle. Unfortunately that didn't work... so i'll try being nice. Then next time i'll be rude again
Just watch any accident in F1, you'll see all it takes is someone being in the wrong place, with so many variables it's impossible to control all interactions.

I don't think any changes to the helmet would have made much difference. His helmet was undamaged from what I could see, I think it was the impact on his neck that did the damage...

Haven't seen the autopsy, or pics of the helmet, so who knows. What i'm going by is, i've seen guys in motocross land on their heads and snap their neck broken. Most end up paralytic, but the only two i've seen dead died from a swollen brain, caused by the main impact itself. Which makes me think you're probably right, no matter how good your helmet is, if your head accelerates quick enough in any direction the brain inside will still get smashed against your own skull, so even if the helmet and bone are intact your brain will still sustain heavy damage. Meaning the only way to avoid this would be for the helmet to be almost afixed to the chassis, which in the end i guess may be even more dangerous, statistically speaking

Why doesn't anyone really thinks about how unsafe the layout of racing cars with exposed wheels and open cockpits is?

It's not like a closed cockpit can guarantee you'll never die, right?

In the end once you get into one of these things, you're taking a risk. Heck, just getting out of bed everyday puts you at risk, even though people have died from a plane crashing at their house so staying in bed isn't 100% risk free either....
In the end, for this particular case it seems having a re-look at the tethering mechanism would yield the most benefits. Like others have said here and elsewhere, F2 wheels seem just a bit more prone to coming loose than what we currently see in F1.
Then again we saw one of the Toro Rosso drivers (I think TR, Barcelona was it?) see a rear wheel (yes car attached to it) pass inches away from his head this year. And didn't Vettel almost lose a finger at Spa because of a similar situation prior to being in F1? Pieces of debris fly in unpredictable directions, that's fact.

[dumrick]

It's not like a closed cockpit can guarantee you'll never die, right?

Sure, we must be aware that risk is a part of this sport but, in the same way safety belts and crash structures were introduced to control it, if there is a record of accidents that prove that the current roll bar regulations and the virtual line between them being over a driver's head are only enough in a flat world, something should be made to improve it.

Then again we saw one of the Toro Rosso drivers (I think TR, Barcelona was it?) see a rear wheel (yes car attached to it) pass inches away from his head this year. And didn't Vettel almost lose a finger at Spa because of a similar situation prior to being in F1? Pieces of debris fly in unpredictable directions, that's fact.

Exactly two of the cases that come to my mind, where terrible injuries were avoided by luck, not by design.
Another one (Ernesto Viso's):
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkSr1rQ0W1g[/youtube]

Or this one (warning, fatal crash - driver and marshall-):
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3C_M5H9 ... re=related[/youtube]

In my view, the best tribute we must pay to all people that have succumbed in the sport is to learn something from their sacrifice in the benefit of better stardards. I wouldn't fly if I didn't knew that air crashes are in the origin of most current safety systems.
And if we're dealing with avoiding collision between objects and driver's helmets, this is what springs to my mind:


Tradition is mostly something that is used to justify the irrational.

[The FOZ]

One could also look into making helmets even stronger.

I've not heard one way or another, but my instinct tells me that this wasn't a head injury, but a spinal cord injury. No helmet made of earthly materials could absorb that much impact energy without transferring a fatal amount of force to the spinal column. I consider the HANS system to be very good, and I don't think even that could be made good enough to have saved poor Surtees in this accident.

The bottom line - if you're going fast, and something hard and heavy enough makes contact with your head, you're going to very possibly die. We are ultimately frail beings, with very vulnerable heads perched atop very vulnerable spinal columns. Why we ever left the grassy savannas is well beyond me.

But this is a risk the drivers take. Nobody gets into a race car without knowing that they could very well never get out.

We can talk about runoff areas, and gravel traps, and better wheel restraints all we wish.

The bottom line is, none of those systems are perfect, and we will get loose wheels from time to time, and many other heavy, hard objects flying freely, and some of them may find their way onto the track, and if a driver happens to get in the way of one of those, the results will not be good.

Sadly, no matter what we do, short of abandoning the open wheel, open cockpit format altogether, this sort of thing could happen again. It might be tomorrow, during practice for the Hungarian GP, or it could be in 10 years, or it could never happen again, all on it's own.

This was that much of a freak occurrence, and we can't prevent those. What happened to Henry Surtees was terrible, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but it has happened before, it happened here, and it will happen again.