Active Suspension Ban & 1994 Driver Crashes?

[BenzilLobo]

Do you think the active suspension & driver aid bans being rushed in for 1994 contributed in someway towards the crashes?

I did some research into number of accidents between 1993 and 1995. By the end of May 1994 F1 had suffered nine serious accidents resulting two fatalities and five major injuries and two very lucky escapes. Compare that to 1993 and 1995 where there was five and three major accidents by June in those respective years. Fortunately none of the accidents in 1993 and 1995 resulted in serious injuries or fatalities.

Senna predicted 1994 was “going to be a season with lots of accidents.” And I think most teams including Simtek were planning on using active for 1994, until Mosley enforced the ban.

So how much was the active ban a contributing factor to the accidents in early 1994?

[waynes]

Ratzenberger hit his front wing on a kerb which then failed causing his accident
Senna was killed by a wishbone penetrating his helmet.

Direct cause of death wasn't active suspension being banned nor should it be suggested in either case.

[NL_Fer]

Traction control and active suspension were banned because the cars were too fast already. Fia wanted to slow them down.

[Maritimer]

I've read things about the cars having been initially developed to be unstable to make best use of the active systems, like a fighter jet being uncontrollable without its computer systems, but I think the rules were changed early enough that the cars were just fine come 94. It was just an outlier year for incidents.

[Big Tea]

If you watch interviews with drivers who have the first drive in an F1 car, they all say how physically demanding it is and that they are sore and on the edge of coping.
Active would probably make the car too much for a human to handle as they are.

[TwanV]

AS was not banned because of grip levels, it was banned for safety reasons and to level the field as Williams were too dominant. AS is potentially deadly if the system should lose hydraulic pressure (although Williams already implemented bump stops and an immediate engine cut out of that were to happen to convince Mansell to drive it.) The subsequent quick and dirty fix to minimize influence of AS being taken away by lowering and stiffening the suspension to the limits in early 94 was more dangerous though, as we have seen..

[Tommy Cookers]

afaik and fwiw ....
degraded hydraulic pressure had more to do with safety of the Lotus system
Dave W who posted on this site designed the Lotus system

Active Ride (Lotus or another's IP) touted a feature whereby it could automatically recover from rear breakaway by ....
in millisecs extending (rear outside and another ??) actuators to increase contact load where and when beneficial
making driving easier not harder

btw
service aircraft started 'instability'/automatic control (without 'computers' or software) in the F-4 Phantom of 1956 design
ie if the pitch stability augmentation (gyro) is tripped the pilot on non-visual approach should pull the big red handle
only since c 1995 have digitals-in-the-loop been fast enough to compete (the 1980s X-31 technology program couldn't)
ok now combat aircraft even have computers taking over the flying to recover when the pilot has messed up

[Jolle]

I’m of the believe that Formula one was lucky up to 1994 and that San Marino was one big wake up call. Before that driver safety wasn’t really looked at in a scientific way. Big flat bottoms that could stall, no upper body driver protection, no real crash tests and on track safely that was long away from avoiding accidents (they even left stranded cars on track and have no speed limit in the pit).

It’s more a miracle that in the decade before nobody died.