So as per usual it seems the symptoms rather than the causes of the problems are being dealt with, which isn't good...
I tend to agree with the idea that this move, while sensible in one respect, hardly removes the risk to all in the pitlane.
Although pit crews wear helmets, that would not have stopped the injuries that occurred on Sunday (torso injuries). Also there will still be 'unprotected' personnel in the area, notably those on the pit wall - there is no reason why a loose wheel would not head towards them either. Likewise a loose wheel, perhaps in freak circumstance admittedly, may just find itself going from the pitlane onto the track - Henry Surtees, enough said.
I meant to post some thoughts on this but never got around to it; now is as good a time as any i guess. The subject of increasing pit lane safety might just provide interesting discussion from both sporting and technical perspectives. What do we think are other ways of increasing or preventing these types of problems?
Let's quickly review the causes of unsafe pit releases - as teams strive to reduce pit stop times, it would appear that mistakes are being made with regard to releasing a car safely, be it into the path of another driver, or via miscommunication between wheel men and the person controlling release of the car.
So how to prevent this? Here are just a few of my ideas...
Please note that for the sake of this discussion, i am assuming that tyre deg/performance/changes will remain as they are, ie 2 or 3 stops per race.
Technical ideas:
- the light system is made mandatory to all teams, and wheel gunners on all four corners have to indicate a safely secured tyre manually. The driver cannot see a green light until they get the 'go' signal from all gunners plus the main engineer overseeing the stop.
- GPS systems that manually prevent release when another car is close enough to present a risk (there are problems with this theory, i.e. a car in an adjacent box, but perhaps there are workarounds based on car speeds).
- A combination of both of the above, to cover a wider range of eventualities.
Sporting ideas (these are generally more obvious in my view):
- simply reduce the pit lane speed limit; this allows for greater reaction time from those controlling the stops. However, this would still potentially allow releases with unsecured wheels as we saw on Sunday; but it would surely prevent releases into the paths of other cars.
- enforce a minimum pit stop time. During the refuelling era we VERY rarely saw unsafe tyre related issues, because the tyre guys had probably double the time to finish their task. While this would potentially allow safer, more considered pit work, i personally do not believe that it would work with the sporting ethos of F1 and pit stops.
Ok, my post is long enough (
), but i hope this provides some food for thought. I can think of more possibilities that i left out, for sake of post length. As i said, i believe there is a lot of scope for solutions in this area, even if they may be convoluted in some cases (but hey, F1 is like that!). Please post your own ideas, critique mine, whatever!
