That's when a "paper" titled "Determination of the Pressure Distribution Beneath Two- and Three-Inch Wide Racing Safety Belts" will be presented at the biannual SAE Motorsports Engineering Conference & Exposition.

This is an "oral only" paper, meaning that the author is not submitting a formal paper for publication and distribution. There can be several reasons for this, but since the author is John Melvin, an active researcher, there is a good chance he just walked out of the lab and cannot put together a paper by Monday's submission deadline.

Given the timing, this work may not affect the 2007 season--or any other season for that matter--but if you do not need belts now, it may pay to wait.

As usual, there are some excellent topics on the docket. The schedule of technical sessions can be found here:
http://www.sae.org/servlets/techSession?EV...=SESSION_MATRIX

FYI.