Woooo Hoooo! Let's go break something!!

[gsbaker]

Now really, next to your favorite activity of racing, what would you most like to do in your free time? A little gardening, perhaps? Bird watching, maybe? Oh, oh, I know! Knitting.

Get real. Any racer worth his salt knows that in those moments of solitude, when his life resembles the cover art of Rod Stewart's "Never a Dull Moment" (ya there DB?), what he really wants to do is blow something up. Yup, admit it. If you can't hear the sound of the crank bumping up against the rev limiter, smell the brakes getting cooked or feel the ABS kicking in, you would love to experience the soothing, all-enveloping sound and feel of a good explosion.

Well, too bad, we can't offer that.

However, there is an excellent substitute which is not only non-destructive and politically correct, it can be scientifically justified. How good is that, eh? It is called a (Dr. Evil air quotes, please) "crash test". So, just for the heck of it, how about a crash party.

We could use the 50G sled at Wayne State, the 70G sled at Delphi or the 100G sled at MGA. (We could also use one of the European sleds, but why make the trek.) We could test anything or nothing, it's up to you. We could make it casual and just for grins, or we could go semi-formal and present it to the SAE for publication. We could keep it within IT.com or spread the word to other racers.

So, given all the safety issues involved in racing today, if you could have your own crash test, what would it be?

[ddewhurst]

***So, given all the safety issues involved in racing today, if you could have your own crash test, what would it be?***

Lateral test each H & N restraint system at 100G with a normal race seat, no lateral head support built in seat, no side nets or other H&N lateral support systems.

I would believe these videos would make one hell of a tool to re-kick your sales effort showing what some H & N restraints do not do. I would believe the videos would also kick off a real thought process for the SCCA CRB & BoD.

I was at the Farm this weekend for a National race & put a HANS on just to see. My first comment to the owner was that the HANS offers minimal lateral support as compared to the Isaac. The owners words, thoughts were a shrug of the shoulders. The owner is a pretty bright young man with many accomplishments in WKA Karting, SCCA Pro Spec Miata & SCCA FC. Monkey see, monkey do. I really don't believe many people who purchase H & N restraint research the details. They buy because the HANS is IRL, Champ car, NASCAR, F1 mandatory.

As a marketing consultant my fee is quite reasonable. One Isaac to go please & it will match my cap.

[Dave Burchfield]

Gregg,

Ummm.............lemmie see........how 'bout we crash the 009 Aston Martin like they did this weekend? Only rather than launch it backwards at turn 7 for a reported flight of 147 feet into China Beach, we crash it into something really good like the 30 degree offset at Delphi? I'll be there!!!! ..........or maybe we could crash some narrow minds into a concrete wall late one evening......... I could go on, but I am afraid it would go downhill from here........

[MMiskoe]

How about a pair of 2800 pound cars going nose to driver side door?

Or same car landing on its roof?

LF wheel intrusion into the footwell?

I've often wondered what the weakest point of the type of roll cages that we use would be. The mounts? Would it deform to the point of crushing the driver? Would the tubing rip apart at the welds?

Pretty morbid thoughts.

[924Guy]

Ah, if only the sled could do a multiple-impact test... throw a couple of obliques or the like at some H+N restraints...

[Despr8dave]

I think we should take a class A motorhome and drop it from a crane on it&#39;s nose, from say a height of 4 feet. Yes, only 4 feet. This should scare the hell out of anybody driving one of these potential bombs. Oh, wait a minute, I sell these for a living. ......Hey, what the hell, RV really does stand for "rolling volcano". Of course, the federal government may get involved and actually create laws for safety items on RV&#39;s. Will only save lives and cost $$$$$$$$$$!! <_< Lots of money.

[Knestis]

As a die-hard fan, I keep hearing the theme from Mythbusters as I read this. The quote a couple of weeks ago was, "If it&#39;s worth doing, it&#39;s worth overdoing" - right before they blew Buster up with a pair of explosive pants, I think...

The lateral impact is a good suggestion but it would be cool to see it looking at a number of permutations, combining parts into systems. It&#39;s been suggested that "wing" seats without off-side nets might actually be less safe in some offset situations, than would be non-wing seats, for example.

K

[gsbaker]

Since this thread was initiated solely for the purpose of amusement, my personal favorite thus far is Dave&#39;s idea of dropping the motorhome on it&#39;s nose. If he can find one headed to the scrap heap we might be off and running--well, certainly "off".

One of Dave B&#39;s offerings conjurs up pleasant images also.

However, you guys may have stumbled onto something. Hmm. Let us do some checking...

[jamsilvia]

***So, given all the safety issues involved in racing today, if you could have your own crash test, what would it be?***

Lateral test each H & N restraint system at 100G with a normal race seat, no lateral head support built in seat, no side nets or other H&N lateral support systems.

I would believe these videos would make one hell of a tool to re-kick your sales effort showing what some H & N restraints do not do. I would believe the videos would also kick off a real thought process for the SCCA CRB & BoD.

I was at the Farm this weekend for a National race & put a HANS on just to see. My first comment to the owner was that the HANS offers minimal lateral support as compared to the Isaac. The owners words, thoughts were a shrug of the shoulders. The owner is a pretty bright young man with many accomplishments in WKA Karting, SCCA Pro Spec Miata & SCCA FC. Monkey see, monkey do. I really don&#39;t believe many people who purchase H & N restraint research the details. They buy because the HANS is IRL, Champ car, NASCAR, F1 mandatory.

As a marketing consultant my fee is quite reasonable. One Isaac to go please & it will match my cap.
[/b]

I would love to see lateral side tests - both with and without HANS/R3/Issac. When I was shopping, I looked around for some concrete data for all of the systems. There&#39;s just not a lot of good non-marketing type data there. This could be a chance to get some 3rd party data that wouldn&#39;t be given out with whatever spin the advertisers want it.

Dropping an RV on it&#39;s nose, though.....that would be damn cool! (scary, but cool)

joe

[gsbaker]

Geez, I try to have a little fun and within eight posts you guys turn it into work. Gosh, thanks!

Back soon.

[gsbaker]

You guys are geniuses. Seriously, you have just come up with a great idea for getting around a huge problem inherent with lateral testing. I&#39;m jammed for time now and need to confirm something, but I&#39;ll try to get back with more details later.

Someone should revoke my engineering license for not having thought of this.

[benracin]

We&#39;re going to need to cranes for this one, but take the motorhome dropping on it&#39;s nose, now add a second motorhome above that one and give it a good following gap. This will help test the RV train crash. The first guy tried to stop but the second guy was too busy watching his big screen tv to see the first guy.

DOUBLE BLAM!!!!

Oh, and then blow the whole thing sky high like they did to that cement mixer on myth busters.

[lateapex911]

Having just crafted my letter requesting a stay of execution for the 1/1/07 Head and neck restraints must be SFI certified requirement, I ,ight be a bit grumpy.

So I would request that whatever test you do, meets the stupid SFI requirements.


Or put the entire organization on the sled and test them...sans anything for protection. And maybe toss on an SCCA lawyer type or two, just so they can feel what it will be like after I hit something having been required to take my Isaac off.

Lawyers: 1
Common sense: 0

and another loss for personal responsibilty on the slipperly slope ........

[gsbaker]

Relax Jake, we&#39;re pedaling as fast as we can.

Hey, it might be a good idea to have the BoD at the tests.

[gsbaker]

As is obvious from the replys, there is significant interest in lateral testing of head and neck restraints. This is a serious issue that has not been adequately researched, IMHO. Within the past six months we conducted some testing that addressed this question, among others, but it has not been published. Personally, I&#39;d prefer dropping an RV on its nose to see if the microwave dislodges, but that&#39;s just me.

We have always wanted to conduct a complete lateral impact test series but there are problems desiging a valid test on the big-hit sleds. For one thing, the Hybrid III dummy is designed for frontal impacts and is not instrumented to measure side body loads, plus the arms and shoulders on the impact side tend to get damaged. For lateral testing you need a SID dummy. Unfortunately, these do not have arms, which raises questions about the validity of the results. Also, lateral testing tends to blow up seats like there is no tomorrow. This is why some people like to perform lateral testing--or any testing with a lateral component--using bench seats. We appreciate that that keeps things simple, but who races with a bench seat?

I love Dave D&#39;s idea of smacking the living snot out of everything at 100Gs. Unfortunately, we&#39;d be picking up pieces for a week after each test and someone is going to have to pay for a lot of seats and dummies. (A fully instrumented dummy runs about $100K; replacing the upper neck load cell is about $10K.)

For all the above reasons no one has performed comparative testing of H&N restraints in pure lateral impacts on high G sleds. There have been tests of side nets, but nothing that tests H&N restraints alone. Doing so is difficult and the results are questionable given the need for a dummy with no arms. Great idea; too bad we can&#39;t do it. The closest anyone has ever come is our recent work which isolated the lateral head torque in the 30 degree offset SFI test at Delphi.

Kirk&#39;s suggestion of considering the various combinations of H&N restraints, seats and nets brings into the equation the valid question of degree, i.e. at what level of G load do you need a side net, head surround seats, etc? Food for thought.

So, step back, take a deap breath and think about this for a minute. If you want to know how well a head and neck restraint works in side impacts, what do you want to measure? You want to measure head loads compared to a driver who has no protection. If you do this for all products, you have an idea of how well each product works. Simple.

But if that&#39;s the objective, why smash everything at 5 billion Gs just to produce sub-atomic particles and learn nothing? Why not put a real dummy, with arms, into a real racing seat and crash it on a real sled in a pure lateral impact and measure the head loads without blowing everything up? If we want to know about relative performance, why be concerned about absolute impact? Why not dial down the impact enough to keep all the pieces together? Hit everything at a lower G and still determine the relative performance.

We&#39;ve been working the phones. Both Wayne State Bioengineering Center and the Delphi lab are good to go.

[lateapex911]

Cool, I knew you were up to something, as usual.

But, if you go lower impact loads, will the results translate up the scale? In other words, how can you predict the linearity? Some designs would, I imagine, not react in a linear fashion. Perhaps a set of three hits, at different lower levels, just shy of the &#39;damage stuff&#39; point, to try and get some points that could be extrapolated from?

[gsbaker]

But, if you go lower impact loads, will the results translate up the scale? In other words, how can you predict the linearity? Some designs would, I imagine, not react in a linear fashion. Perhaps a set of three hits, at different lower levels, just shy of the &#39;damage stuff&#39; point, to try and get some points that could be extrapolated from?
[/b]

An excellent point, sir.

Testing has shown that head loads are not a linear function of impact, but it&#39;s close enough that proportionality is used frequently as a rule of thumb for estimating absolute levels. For comparative purposes it&#39;s a non-issue, i.e. if a product has a certain head load reduction at 50Gs, say, it&#39;s reasonable to see the same general level of performance at different impacts.

There is plenty of precedent. At both the 2002 and 2004 SAE conferences Melvin, Begeman and Foster authored papers comparing the performance of various H&N restraints on the 50G sled at WSU. Because the issue was relative performance, there was no question of absolute load levels at different impacts.

You would be doing exactly the same thing here, with the same sled and the same dummy. The only difference is that you rotate everything 90 degrees and dial down the impact.

[Eagle7]

Testing has shown that head loads are not a linear function of impact, but it&#39;s close enough that proportionality is used frequently as a rule of thumb for estimating absolute levels. For comparative purposes it&#39;s a non-issue, i.e. if a product has a certain head load reduction at 50Gs, say, it&#39;s reasonable to see the same general level of performance at different impacts.
[/b]

I&#39;ll be Earnhart&#39;s belts would have worked fine at 20G, but failed at a higher level. If the SkullSaver Supreme slips out of the harness at a high G level, isn&#39;t that a major non-linearity which a low-G crash wouldn&#39;t demonstrate?

[Doc Bro]

[quote]
...a dummy with no arms.



I&#39;ll leave that one to just sit for a while.....


R

[MMiskoe]

Well seeing as how we IT guys are driving considerably slower cars than those w/ the Big Money, what G&#39;s should we expect to see in a typical incident? We won&#39;t have 180mph impact w/ a fixed concrete wall (well maybe in ITR??)

I&#39;m thinking that you can&#39;t prepare for the absolute worst w/o just staying home. So what sorts of forces are invovled in a "typical" crash of an IT car (if there is one). This then gets back to where Kirk was going of at what point does a XXX type of restraint come into play. Do we play in a world where things like NASCAR softwalls even have an effect?

On the subject of side loads on H&N restraints, I unfortunately know that the seat plays a big part in a side impact. Case in point a side impact where the driver had left his Hans in the trailer did not survive, but unclear if the neck injuries or the abdominal injuries from the seat were to blame. Side load tests should include some testing to see where the seat becomes a bigger player than the H&N.

I am guessing that most of the frontal impact testing has shown how to restrain a body adequately, now the other directions need to be explored.


Dropping RV&#39;s on their nose sounds like way more fun the considering what could become of you in a racecar. How fast do you think the sled would need to be going to cut a 40&#39; motorhome in half when hit side on?