Comments on: Kovalainen Pays Tribute To Strong Car & Attentive Staff

By: Hungary 2009: Massa Rests His Weary Head After Successful Surgery » BlogF1

Hungary 2009: Massa Rests His Weary Head After Successful Surgery » BlogF1 — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 18:55:25 +0000

[...] Kovalainen recovers well from accident and praises the safety measures of the cars and circuits: Kovalainen Pays Tribute To Strong Car & Attentive Staff. AKPC_IDS += "6604,"; Tags: Felipe Massa, Ferrari, Heikki Kovalainen, HUN09, Hungarian Grand [...]

By: james

james — Sun, 04 May 2008 03:42:08 +0000

I agree with Nik, the gravel trap at Barcelona was pretty ineffective in slowing Heikki’s car.
As in past accidents, as with Michael Schumacher in 1999 and Luciano Burti in 2001, even larger gravel traps often fail to slow the cars down in time before hitting the wall.
My other concern is the conveyor belts around the tyres, which as we all know, is designed
to keep the rows of tyres together, and how easily that belt was penetrated by the McLaren.
When I saw that the belt had gone up and over Heikki’s car, I got very concerned.
The good points about the crash are obviously that Heikki survived and was relatively uninjured,
yet again the cars have shown that they can take a hard lick and save the driver, and that the track safety people were well on the ball and behaved very well indeed.
I think, as more and more new tracks are introduced, it is easy for us to take safety for granted. The older circuits, such as Barcelona, do not have the vast run off areas as say Bahrain or Turkey, and they are not tarmac runoffs.
It is a classic case of ‘you are damned if you do, damned if you don’t.’ Nobody wants to see huge crashes like Heikki’s or Robert Kubica’s last year, but nobody wants to see the tracks
‘dumbed down’ to the extent that they are all identical and souless. Getting close to the armco and running tight, highspeed corners is what F1 is about, and we must never forget that.

By: Oliver White

Oliver White — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:29:49 +0000

I have submitted your article to autocar-live.com

Thank you. Here's a link to the article's page on the site for anyone else interested: BlogF1 on Autocar-Live.

By: Autocar-Live

Autocar-Live — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:25:56 +0000

I have submitted your article to http://www.autocar-live.com which is a social site about cars where users submit car/auto articles they like and vote for articles that others submitted and they like.

By: nik

nik — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 07:17:52 +0000

not enough run-off on that corner, the gravel trap barely slowed him down. To make things worse, the wall was perpendicular to the track direction prior to the corner, so anybody going off would be meeting that wall at very high speeds. They should definitely provide more runoff on those corners at all circuits, and have the wall run parallel for as far as it can.

Both the gravel and the tyres did not perform, and if Heikki was any worse off from the accident you could be sure that there would have been an in-depth investigation, but since he walked out (because of the high level of protection the cars now provide) everybody will probably forget about it and move on.

The cars seem extremely safe for the drivers now, but they have compromised rear-view vision in favor of high sides in the cockpit. The poor vision has been responsible for a large number of collisions this year already.. so it would be good to get all tracks to a standard like Bahrain (in terms of safety) and perhaps take the cars back to more of a true and traditional open-wheel design.

By: Robb

Robb — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 03:20:34 +0000

glad he’s ok.

By: Oliver White

Oliver White — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:56:30 +0000

I don’t really know just yet what has changed, but the tyre walls definitely appear to not be working as effectively as in the past. It isn’t all that often a driver goes head-first into the them at any force like Heikki did, but I think, just from looking at the photo, they didn’t work as well we all perhaps thought. My initial guess is that the cars have changed, but the barriers haven’t. But the cars haven’t changed that much over the years. Not that significantly anyway!? I’m working on a post at the moment, so maybe I can uncover something or apply a bit of common sense to the matter.

By: Ben Coburn

Ben Coburn — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:30:20 +0000

I wonder if anything can be done to prevent tirewalls lifting out of the way like that. Seems like something that should at least be investigated, makes them ineffective exactly when they’re needed most.

The obvious first-guess solution is to just dig them into the ground by a tire width or so, so the car can’t even get under the bottom tire, but there’s probably some reason why that doesn’t really work.