Would a covered cockpit have helped Bianchi ?

[iotar__]

It is not feasible to mitigate the injuries Bianchi suffered by either enclosing the driver’s cockpit, or fitting skirts to the crane. Neither approach is practical due to the very large forces involved in the accident between a 700kg car striking a 6500kg crane at a speed of 126kph. There is simply insufficient impact structure on a F1 car to absorb the energy of such an impact without either destroying the driver’s survival cell, or generating non-survivable decelerations.
It is considered fundamentally wrong to try and make an impact between a racing car and a large and heavy vehicle survivable. It is imperative to prevent a car ever hitting the crane and/or the marshals working near it.

common sense really, treat the disease not the symptoms.
if left up to the driver yellow flags are just an opportunity to gain and advantage by slowing less than the guy in
front or behind

My definition of a common sense is different then. Why even include theoretical alternative from the future that has nothing to do with this accident in a report about it? Make it a separate study although I'm pretty certain this accident didn't change anything when it comes to cockpits, impacts etc Why would a single specific incident be decisive in adding cockpits anyway, wasn't it about tyres or other smaller objects mostly? This report is a mixture that includes everything: even superlicense and sunset so driver's speed is clearly not the end of it.

As for "the better grasp" (from different post), from conclusions:

7: During the 2 seconds Bianchi's car was leaving the track and traversing the run-off area, he applied both throttle and brake together, using both feet. The FailSafe algorithm is designed to over-ride the throttle and cut the engine, but was inhibited by the Torque Coordinator, which controls the rear Brake-by-Wire system. Bianchi's Marussia has a unique design of BBW, which proved to be incompatible with the FailSafe settings.
8: The fact that the FailSafe did not disqualify the engine torque requested by the driver may have affected the impact velocity; it has not been possible to reliably quantify this. However, it may be that Bianchi was distracted by what was happening and the fact that his front wheels had locked, and been unable to steer the car such that it missed the crane.

1. So there was no working failsafe system at all but is it required or not? 2. Why mix driver's reaction (purely speculative "distracted") with failsafe that didn't work and may or may not have affected the velocity had it worked?

[Richard]

By the way, has anyone got a copy of the full report?

[Tim.Wright]

Just putting this out there, but hitting the skirt on a crane would be like hitting a brick wall (i.e. fatal at that speed). As a reference the crash zones on an F1 car are designed for a 54km/h impact with a solid wall. Jules was doing 120.

The skirts would need to be lined with tyres to make them safe, at which point its all becoming a bit of a joke.

Skirts on a crane is an ill thought out knee jerk reaction which misses the root cause of the problem which was a competitor driving through a double waved yellow zone on the limit of adhesion.

If you drive at an acceptable speed, it would have been IMPOSSIBLE to inadvertently reach the area where the crane was, even if your wheels accidentally fell off...

[lebesset]

at the end of the day I suppose that the finger of blame should be pointed at the FIA for not introducing regulations which FORCED drivers to follow them instead of leaving a degree of latitude?
but am I the only person who remembers the storm of criticism which followed the race director at silverstone when he insisted on delaying the race for a long time to repair the barriers after Kimi had hit them .....the main line of argument seemed to be ...what are the chances of another car hitting exactly there ?

[langwadt]

It is not feasible to mitigate the injuries Bianchi suffered by either enclosing the driver’s cockpit, or fitting skirts to the crane. Neither approach is practical due to the very large forces involved in the accident between a 700kg car striking a 6500kg crane at a speed of 126kph. There is simply insufficient impact structure on a F1 car to absorb the energy of such an impact without either destroying the driver’s survival cell, or generating non-survivable decelerations.
It is considered fundamentally wrong to try and make an impact between a racing car and a large and heavy vehicle survivable. It is imperative to prevent a car ever hitting the crane and/or the marshals working near it.

common sense really, treat the disease not the symptoms.
if left up to the driver yellow flags are just an opportunity to gain and advantage by slowing less than the guy in
front or behind

My definition of a common sense is different then. Why even include theoretical alternative from the future that has nothing to do with this accident in a report about it?

My point was that avoiding the accident instead of trying to reduce the impact is common sense, that they included
the rest I assume was just that they felt they had to address all talk of how easy it was to "fix"

[Andres125sx]

should I believe anyone who tells me that bianchi's car was trapped under the tractor ?

Sorry for my poor english, I was assuming you´d get the idea and didn´t take the time to word it properly.... or better at least, as my english is not good enough for these technical explanations

The car embebed under the crane, is that correct? And that happened even when the impact angle was far from 90º only because of a reason, the crane did not have skirts and the rear part of the crane is much taller than a F1 car. That caused the car to got stuck under the crane, when it could have bounced if the crane have skirts. Deceleration would have been much lower then

I´m not saying that´s the main problem, or the root of the problem, I was only pointing that the report says skirts would have changed nothing, and I disagree with that specific point. Just a clarification, not that I´m saying that was the problem

[hollus]

Edit: Sorry Andres, we posted just seconds apart...
Skirts (exactly how thick do you want them?) could have helped... or not. They could have pulled a Kubica on Jules, they could have bent and then directly hit his helmet...
Arguments based on "in this case, at that speed, position an angle" miss the whole picture. In a fire in your street car, the lack of safety belts and impact resistant windows can help you too.

[PlatinumZealot]

This is basically a freak accident. The driver was going at a speed he thought was perfectly manageable around the turn, but instead he aquaplaned off. A normal occurence in Formula 1, however the consequences were grave. I don't think anyone is to blame.

[BTS]

.....the main line of argument seemed to be ...what are the chances of another car hitting exactly there ?

The bottom line, according to me... we don't want to find out!

[Andres125sx]

Arguments based on "in this case, at that speed, position an angle" miss the whole picture.

But the report is about this specific case, that´s what I´m saying, the report says "it is no feasible to mitigate the injuries Bianchi suffered by either enclosing the driver’s cockpit, or fitting skirts to the crane. " They´re asserting, if they´d have said what you say, I´d have to agree, we can´t know, but there´s a good chance they might be helpful to deflect the car and avoid it´s embebed inside the crane, so their assertion looks light to me

Anycase forgot it, I don´t want to discuss about semantics and we agree on the main point, too much speed for a yellow zone with too much water, and even when the main responsible is the driver, you cannot ask a driver to slow down more than the rest if there´s no rule dictating a max speed

[langwadt]

Arguments based on "in this case, at that speed, position an angle" miss the whole picture.

But the report is about this specific case, that´s what I´m saying, the report says "it is no feasible to mitigate the injuries Bianchi suffered by either enclosing the driver’s cockpit, or fitting skirts to the crane. " They´re asserting, if they´d have said what you say, I´d have to agree, we can´t know, but there´s a good chance they might be helpful to deflect the car and avoid it´s embebed inside the crane, so their assertion looks light to me

Anycase forgot it, I don´t want to discuss about semantics and we agree on the main point, too much speed for a yellow zone with too much water, and even when the main responsible is the driver, you cannot ask a driver to slow down more than the rest if there´s no rule dictating a max speed

exactly, you could put the blame on the driver for going to fast, but he was only doing his job; going as fast as the (enforcement of) rules allow

[lebesset]

should I believe anyone who tells me that bianchi's car was trapped under the tractor ?

Sorry for my poor english, I was assuming you´d get the idea and didn´t take the time to word it properly.... or better at least, as my english is not good enough for these technical explanations

The car embedded under the crane, is that correct? And that happened even when the impact angle was far from 90º only because of a reason, the crane did not have skirts and the rear part of the crane is much taller than a F1 car. That caused the car to got stuck under the crane, when it could have bounced if the crane have skirts. Deceleration would have been much lower then

I´m not saying that´s the main problem, or the root of the problem, I was only pointing that the report says skirts would have changed nothing, and I disagree with that specific point. Just a clarification, not that I´m saying that was the problem

at no point was the car embedded under the tractor ; if you see the slomo you will see that although the car was travelling past the rear of the tractor the tow hitch on the back of the tractor caught the roll hoop on the car and stopped it much quicker than would otherwise have been the case , tearing the roll hoop and rear bodywork off the car in the process

I would like to hear about the condition of bianchi's helmet , as far as I could see from the video it only made a glancing blow on the tractor [ the inquiry report doesn't seem to say that ], the high G force injury coming when the car decelerated violently when the roll hoop caught ; when I looked at the overhead pictures I got the impression that if there had been no tractor he might well have passed through the gap in the armco and hit the concrete wall behind head on , very difficult to judge though

[user001]

No it wouldn't have. It was said that the forces during the crash where so strong there is actually not material with a closed cockpit which could have endured the collision. Said the report.

[Ciro Pabón]

Well, winth, that's not what the report says. It says that "without either destroying the driver’s survival cell, or generating non-survivable decelerations".

This means that if:

a) you use a less rigid material, it would be destroyed or

b) you use a more rigid material, you destroy the driver.

[Andres125sx]

Well, winth, that's not what the report says. It says that "without either destroying the driver’s survival cell, or generating non-survivable decelerations".

This means that if:

a) you use a less rigid material, it would be destroyed or

b) you use a more rigid material, you destroy the driver.

Hi Ciro. I´m sure you´ll agree this is not accurate either

That´d be the case if they´re thinking about stopping the car completely. Then ok, no material will stop the car at that speed with a rigid object without killing the driver. But that´s the case only for a perpendicular crash... or a crash where the car is embebed like Jules one. Problem comes when all the energy must be disipated in one crash/instant. If it can be divided/distributed at different crashes then the problem is way lower.

It could have been very similar to Kubica crash at Montreal, if my memory serve me well Robert crash with the wall was even faster than Jules one, but even so Robert didn´t suffer any serious injury. If Robert´s car would have been embebed into the wall like Jules car did with the crane, decelerations would have been too high and no material would have saved Robert, but since his car was deflected with the wall (like Jules car could have done with crane skirts), first crash only absorbed a part of the energy, what changes the whole picture.