funkymonkey wrote:
Alienturnedhuman wrote:
funkymonkey wrote:
Jezza13 wrote:
So the question I ask is this.
Hypothetically, lets say Makino's car survived the impact with nothing more than a damaged Halo & a few scratches to the body work and was able to carry on racing as normal.
Would Makino have been shown the black & orange flag, been forced to come into the pits and retire a perfectly drivable car due to the damaged Halo?
I'd hope the answer would be that anytime there's an impact involving the halo being struck the car would at the minimum be pitted and probably retired.
That will be last thing on anyone's mind. But yes, if you have contact on your halo and have visible damage at the joint where it interfaces with the chassis or if the halo frame is bent, immediately bring the car to pits. I dont think anyone would complain after just having their life saved by that piece of hardware.
Given the strength of the halo, if it were damaged then it is almost certain that far more of the car would be broken than the halo making this hypothetical as probable as the Alonso dinosaur related incidents.Yeah, it was always going to be hypothetical question. Given the strength of the impact that will be needed to damage halo, the rest of the car would be in pretty bad shape.
Well what's the strength of the impact needed to damage the Halo sufficiently to warrant retiring the car?
Are these specified somewhere and if so how are they measured? Are there impact sensors on the Halo or is it purely via visual inspection? What if there's an impact that doesn't deform the Halo but may have been of sufficient strength to possibly cause a minor fracture in the structure?
In my hypothetical world we'd know the spring flew out of the back of the car but luckily it ricocheted off the Halo away from the driver. Now, hypothetically, the Halo looks ok visually and the driver is saying everything's fine so is this car allowed to carry on or does it need to be retired from the race?
You can mock my question & say it's as hypothetical as Alonso's dinosaur but I bet you'd have said the same about Massa's accident in Hungary, or Surtees's accident at Brands or Wilsons accident, or dozens of other accidents before they actually happened but dealing with hypothetical scenarios is how we remove or mitigate the risk of injury when a scenario moves from the hypothetical to the factual.
There are different levels of impact and different levels of damage. It's simplistic to think its a case of either the Halo being perfectly fine or trashed and I think it's also simplistic to think that a driver would happily retire his car if the Halo had been struck by something. Think Derek Warwick, Monza 1990 or Martin Brundle, Australia 1996. Two monumental accidents that could so easily have ended tragically but what was the first thing they did when they go out of the car? They ran back to the pits to get in the spare car and do it all again.
No I don't think anyone would complain about the Halo saving their life but i'd expect the driver to not be too happy about having to retire a perfectly normal working car because the Halo may have been damaged in an incident.