GPWizard F1 Forum
F1 News & Discussions => Pit Pass => Topic started by: Jericoke on July 27, 2015, 03:00:24 PM
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At the 2015 Hungarian Grand Prix the front wing on Nico Hulkenberg's car suffered a catastrophic failure. It fell off, and then he ran it over, spreading carbon fibre shards across the track, across another driver and his car. It forced the deployment of the safety car so that workers could safely clean up the track.
So my question is, should the team be penalized in some form for putting out a car that is dangerous? Certainly no one was hurt here, but in another area he might have been close enough to fans that the razor sharp shards could cause injuries. While we enjoy the spectacle that the safety car provides with a 'restart', it is only deployed when something dangerous has happened. I know the teams do their best to make the cars as fast as possible and meet certain minimum requirements for safety, but should they be held responsible when they push the line too far?
Obviously Force India didn't do this on purpose, but if teams are held accountable, they might be a little more conservative, and we don't have to wait for a cloud of carbon fibre to injure someone before the FIA decides to act.
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The car could have quite safe when sent out, but contact somewhere on track could have caused the failure, which would be very hard to police.
Raikonens camera fell off while he was driving, again at the wrong place it could have caused a knock on effect, could that be laid at Ferrari's door. I think there are enough penalties already.
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The team could counter that, since on-track testing isn't available to them for most of the season, almost no structural or aero changes could be made for most of the season.
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Rules rules rules!
Should we have rules for the rules?
Its the panicle of motorsport so failures will happen be it mechanical or human its the nature of the sport.
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I think it's penalty enough for any team to have their car totally wrecked and lose the possibility of any points.
F1 is a prototype formula and will always throw up problems from changes in the design and composition of the car's structure. Others have already said that the lack of in season testing means many new parts on the cars will only get a true load test during a GP, whether that's practice with Kimi's car or the race for the Hulk.
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I think it's penalty enough for any team to have their car totally wrecked and lose the possibility of any points.
F1 is a prototype formula and will always throw up problems from changes in the design and composition of the car's structure. Others have already said that the lack of in season testing means many new parts on the cars will only get a true load test during a GP, whether that's practice with Kimi's car or the race for the Hulk.
My problem isn't with the loss of the car, which I agree is a fair enough punishment, but the inherent danger of that much carbon fibre flying around. We know what happened to Massa with flying debris, so I would consider Kvyat lucky. If this had happened in a corner near a marshal stand, are they adequately protected from that sort of debris? They're volunteers and certainly don't have thousands of dollars worth of safety gear like the drivers do.
Maybe a simple enough 'penalty' is paying for a steak dinner for the volunteers who had to clean up the team's mistakes?
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Missed the race, but my input leans towards not having any more penalties. Jeri, you're starting to sound like the Italian authorities who believe blame can be applied in every accident.
Racing is inherently dangerous. Says so on your ticket, says so in the waiver every Marshall has to sign to have the privilege of working on race day. Says so in the drivers contract preventing them from holding the team accountable.
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I agree Scott and as the local Motorcycle Street Race Marshals co-ordinator its me that has them trained and sign on on the morning of the races to remove any liability from them and also that they understand the risks involved. Last year I went onto a live track to assist a rider recovering his bike done under waved yellows but still a risk especially as it was in a hairpin. The reason for doing it? Its a buzz being that close to the racing and the riders/drivers really do appreciate the marshals role.
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Missed the race, but my input leans towards not having any more penalties. Jeri, you're starting to sound like the Italian authorities who believe blame can be applied in every accident.
Racing is inherently dangerous. Says so on your ticket, says so in the waiver every Marshall has to sign to have the privilege of working on race day. Says so in the drivers contract preventing them from holding the team accountable.
LOL. I'm a mom to a teen. Cars suddenly seem like deathtraps out to kill everyone.
Kvyat's contract would only be with RBR. If he's injured by a failure from Force India is that covered? Is that buried somewhere in Concorde where the teams agree that dangerous designs are a risk of the sport? The FIA has been happy to ban other 'dangerous designs' in the past. I remember when the 'X-Wings' mounted on the side pods about 10 years ago were in fashion, and one broke off during a pitstop. It only took one wing failure, and they were immediately banned.
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I think the waiver signed by the drivers covers pretty much anything that happens on track. I was a crowd marshall at Goodwood and we had to sign one even though we were not as close as the track marshall.
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The waiver did not stop Mark Donohue's family from suing Goodyear et. al. when he was killed. And if penalties were assessed for fragile design, Lotus under Chapman would have been constantly dinged.
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The waiver did not stop Mark Donohue's family from suing Goodyear et. al. when he was killed. And if penalties were assessed for fragile design, Lotus under Chapman would have been constantly dinged.
Not a fragile design. A dangerous design. If the wing fell off and lodged under Nico's car and he sailed into the gravel trap, that's a racing incident. When parts fall off a car and hit other drivers/bystanders, that's what I'd like to see avoided.
That's why the wheels are attached to tethers, because the danger to marshals from a flying wheel was immense. (Wasn't the last 'on track' death from a wheel that escaped its tether?)
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The problem is who decides what is dangerous, the car has passed all of its safety tests, as has been said the only time it gets a real test is in the race, there is no in season testing so parts can't be tested in the way they used to. The only way to stop it is finish the season with the exact car you started with. That would lead to stagnation.
The death from the loose wheel was the marshal in Australia, and as far as I can remember the wheel fitted through a gap only slightly bigger than the wheel itself.
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Missed the race, but my input leans towards not having any more penalties. Jeri, you're starting to sound like the Italian authorities who believe blame can be applied in every accident.
Racing is inherently dangerous. Says so on your ticket, says so in the waiver every Marshall has to sign to have the privilege of working on race day. Says so in the drivers contract preventing them from holding the team accountable.
LOL. I'm a mom to a teen. Cars suddenly seem like deathtraps out to kill everyone.
Kvyat's contract would only be with RBR. If he's injured by a failure from Force India is that covered? Is that buried somewhere in Concorde where the teams agree that dangerous designs are a risk of the sport?
Article 10 of the Sporting Regulations covers this sort of thing. It doesn't require that anyone agrees to dangerous designs being a risk, but it does require everyone to be insured against that possibility.
Article 10.1 makes it the race promoter's responsibility to ensure all drivers, teams and officials have third party insurance that is appropriate for motorsport (the FIA has separate regulations for what they expect such insurance to look like, and is entitled to bar anyone without such insurance from participating in any race it administers until the error is corrected). Interestingly, drivers aren't required to be insured against each other... ...but teams are. So a team can't claim because their race was ruined by an errant bit of carbon fibre, but they can claim if their race was ruined by an errant driver mistaking the track for a computer game.
Article 10.2 requires the circuit and organisers to be covered with equally appropriate insurance, and for any participant to be able to see it on demand. That way, neither Nico nor Force India need worry about being billed for the wall they damaged.
Article 10.3 allows people to have their own insurance in addition to the compulsory one, if they want extra bells and whistles.
The standard motorsport waiver is not a matter of insurance, but a standard piece of legal contracting that the FIA uses because it knows the sport is inherently more dangerous than any reasonable person can completely cover against. I believe the FIA requires this for any event it administers, but I don't know what rule makes this so.
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Rules should penalise recklessness and negligence but they shouldn't stand in the way of innovation. It is right that in trying to maximise performance, F1 cars should be at the very edge of reliability. There shouldn't be penalties if they fall the wrong side of reliability as long as the design had been thoroughly assessed before being adopted. It would be impossible to know if a component had failed or if it had been exposed to external stress i.e. Hulkenberg's wing might have hit a kerb or clipped another car causing a later failure. It would be grossly unfair to then penalise the team for the failure.
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Rules should penalise recklessness and negligence but they shouldn't stand in the way of innovation. It is right that in trying to maximise performance, F1 cars should be at the very edge of reliability. There shouldn't be penalties if they fall the wrong side of reliability as long as the design had been thoroughly assessed before being adopted. It would be impossible to know if a component had failed or if it had been exposed to external stress i.e. Hulkenberg's wing might have hit a kerb or clipped another car causing a later failure. It would be grossly unfair to then penalise the team for the failure.
Would it be fair to penalize the team if Hulkenberg or Checo had a second failure of the same sort then? Once is innovation, twice is negligence?
It should be relatively simple to demonstrate if the car suffered structural damage through normal racing incidents. (In theory if that happened, the car is supposed to be black flagged though. As you point out, it is hard to detect if such microscopic damage has occurred)
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It is also possible that the design is sturdy enough, but the particular piece of carbon fiber was defective.
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If there is one thing F1 does not need it is another rule.
It is a dangerous sport and all those involved know this and accept it. As was mentioned there are waivers that cover this fact and the purchase of a ticket means you theoretically sign another waiver.
Cars breaking down etc is penalty enough and to add more woe to it is unnecessary.
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Ok, lets compare it to something like track and field. If a runner falls and while falling trips up another runner, is there going to be a penalty? Of course not. Even if it's the Gold medal heat of the 100m. $hit happens in racing, wether it's running or F1.
IMO if you want to talk about safety, it won't be about a wing falling off and damaging another car. The discussion should be about tractors or other vehicles on the track when the track is hot, even with local yellows. Bianchi's death a few weeks ago was the result of a horrible decision made by FIA officials who seemed to think the show is more important than safety, and that decision hasn't been addressed or had a policy built to prevent it from ever happening again. VSC is a stupid rule. In F1, until they fix the aero so that cars can run together, or engine rules so teams can catch up to one another, at the very least they should keep the normal SC rules so every now and again we can hope to have the cars bunched up again and have some exciting racing instead of watching the Mercedes disappear into the distance and the whole field spread out to put us to sleep on a Sunday afternoon.
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Ok, lets compare it to something like track and field. If a runner falls and while falling trips up another runner, is there going to be a penalty? Of course not. Even if it's the Gold medal heat of the 100m. $hit happens in racing, wether it's running or F1.
IMO if you want to talk about safety, it won't be about a wing falling off and damaging another car. The discussion should be about tractors or other vehicles on the track when the track is hot, even with local yellows. Bianchi's death a few weeks ago was the result of a horrible decision made by FIA officials who seemed to think the show is more important than safety, and that decision hasn't been addressed or had a policy built to prevent it from ever happening again. VSC is a stupid rule. In F1, until they fix the aero so that cars can run together, or engine rules so teams can catch up to one another, at the very least they should keep the normal SC rules so every now and again we can hope to have the cars bunched up again and have some exciting racing instead of watching the Mercedes disappear into the distance and the whole field spread out to put us to sleep on a Sunday afternoon.
A runner falling isn't what I'm talking about. It's closer to a runner's shoe falling off and spiking someone.
You're right... better safety precautions should be what the FIA is interested in. What happened to Jules simply is unacceptable. I'm just throwing int he pot that what happened to Hulkenberg lead to a yellow not because of anything that happened on track: it was 100% preventable by better design.
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F1 cars have always been on the edge of reliability. The shock that hit Massa, suspension failures on a plethora of cars. A few years ago someone lost the rear wing at the same spot as Hulkenberg. The rule book is fat enough without specing strength minimums for every part.
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Jeri, the investigation into Jules Bianchi's accident did apportion some of the blame on the speed he was traveling at when he aquaplaned off the track (120mph) hence why the new VSC has a limit on time in a section to reduce speed. Accidents defined as: -
"An accident is an incidental and unplanned event that could have been prevented had circumstances leading up to the accident been recognized, and acted upon, prior to its occurrence. Most scientists who study unintentional injury avoid using the term "accident" and focus on factors that increase risk of severe injury and that reduce injury incidence and severity."
Engineers designing race cars are always constrained by safety and quite rightly so but not every factor can be foreseen and with every F1 car being a prototype its development is an ongoing process. If you go back 25 years and look at safety then it has moved on in leaps and bounds but can never be removed but that for drivers an fans is one of the attractions to the sport.
As for penalising drivers of teams for breakages we'll end up watching tractor racing!
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Hear! Hear! Andy, a good and balanced post IMHO. :good:
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No question speed was the cause of the accident, but I think if he had turtled under an steel tractor at half that speed the outcome wouldn't have been much different.
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So many variables, at half the speed the car would not have lifted the tractor off the ground, too many what it's. The safety car should have been there, the vsc is one of the main contributing factors as far as I'm concerned. Get rid asap.
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I was going to put this in a new thread but it seems to fit the discussion here. Franz Tost of Toro Rosso questions the design of the recovery vehicles. He makes a good point. Most of the vehicles used are designed for the construction industry and sit very high. That allows an F1 car to "submarine" the snatch tractor.
http://autoweek.com/article/formula-one/f1-safety-vehicles-are-not-all-safe-says-toro-rosso-boss
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Simple answer. Call SC out for any incidents requiring a tractor on any outside section or straightaway part of the track.
Bin the VSC idea.
(DH1, the VSC was a knee jerk reaction to Bianchi's accident. At the time of his accident the area was covered only by local yellow's...comepletely idiotic call by Charlie when a tractor was recovering Sutil's car).
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Simple answer. Call SC out for any incidents requiring a tractor on any outside section or straightaway part of the track.
Bin the VSC idea.
(DH1, the VSC was a knee jerk reaction to Bianchi's accident. At the time of his accident the area was covered only by local yellow's...comepletely idiotic call by Charlie when a tractor was recovering Sutil's car).
Aha, ok. It should be safety car only as far as I'm concerned. As far as recovery vehicles are concerned similar to HGV's bars could be fitted to open areas. But this would leave marshall open to flying carbon fibre following an impact.
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Virtual Safety Car is a useful tool to have for one-off incidents that happen to be in awkward positions (e.g. a driver has parked the car at the inside of a corner nobody cuts, but a long way from the car access hole). Incidents where there's a reasonable risk of a duplicate accident (crash in straight line from braking zone, oil on the track, anything involving heavy rain), require a full Safety Car.
I'm not sure there's an effective method of getting all the recovery vehicles safe, especially since there's currently no such thing as a retrieval-in-race-orientated recovery vehicle and little market for one (most current vehicles are hired for the weekend before returning to their usual jobs; difficult to do if the vehicle's only designed for races). The better plan is to make sure the vehicles don't get struck in the first place.
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Probably the safest way to retrieve a car is using a crane and I'm surprise more are not used.
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Because they are many times more expensive than tractors. The circuits aren't left with enough change from Bernie to afford cranes. Plus Bernie probably doesn't want them spoiling the backdrop.
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Because they are many times more expensive than tractors. The circuits aren't left with enough change from Bernie to afford cranes. Plus Bernie probably doesn't want them spoiling the backdrop.
You've been to the races... there are cranes everywhere. They're just hooked up to TV cameras. They could pull double duty. Or even look into using the TV helicopters. (I'm not really sure lifting an F1 car by helicopter is a good idea, but considering how deadly the truck solution has been, it can't be worse)
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I'm all for putting enough cranes for full coverage of the circuits, but I think the responsibility should fall under the FIA/FOM, not the struggling circuit promoters.
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Cranes might run afoul of overhead utility lines in the increasing number of street circuits.
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Cranes might run afoul of overhead utility lines in the increasing number of street circuits.
If you can afford Bernie's fees, you can afford to bury your lines ;)
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The 'cranes' used for the cameras at the races are just massive cherry pickers and can't loft an F1 car.
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The 'cranes' used for the cameras at the races are just massive cherry pickers and can't loft an F1 car.
Quite right DH1 cherry pickers would not pick a car up and it would only be road circuits in built up areas that overhead wires would be an issue. I'm sure if they can get cranes into Monaco where there are many cranes then more could be placed in high profile areas on other circuits. If you had a crane company it could give you a bit of advertising too.
Cranes are not the whole answer and I doubt there is just a single answer and cost is obviously an issue but there was talk of vehicles dedicated to recovering race cars which may mean cranes are cheaper?
Helicopters would be a non runner due to their instability in some weather conditions, the down draft could cause accidents and the potential of crashing into the crowd killing hundreds!
I doubt this will be resolved anytime soon unfortunately!
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Nascar and Indy car do it right. A dedicated safety team with vehicles and equipment that travels to each event and a yellow flag and safety car to allow a tilt bed to collect the car.
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Nascar and Indy car do it right. A dedicated safety team with vehicles and equipment that travels to each event and a yellow flag and safety car to allow a tilt bed to collect the car.
Slightly easier for them as they're mostly on the same land mass and can be road hauled each week, much harder to move a whole circus like that around the globe.
They'd probably need at least three sets of everything in F1, if not more, as ocean shipping times take much longer both in and out. Then of course there's the paperwork & safety checks some countries might insist on as they are commercial vehicles and will need to comply with every country's standards.
I mean potentially they could be used for other purposes ;)
- if Bernie gets the chance of a nice little earner on the side - what do we think? :D
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Considering they probably run the NASCAR season for the same price as an F1 race, you would think F1 could afford 3, 4 or even 5 professional safety teams with equipment and vehicles.
I'm sure Bernie or the FIA holding up a race contract until the paperwork gets sorted out would streamline things.
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Considering they probably run the NASCAR season for the same price as an F1 race, you would think F1 could afford 3, 4 or even 5 professional safety teams with equipment and vehicles.
I'm sure Bernie or the FIA holding up a race contract until the paperwork gets sorted out would streamline things.
Now is where we get into tricky international laws.
Can the FIA bring in their own people in place of 'hiring' locals? I'm sure they could sort it out in the EU races (although from what I read about the EU... I wouldn't be surprised if they couldn't).
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The NHRA has done the same since the early 1950's with their outstanding Safety Safari crew.
We know that the top people, like Charlie Whiting and Dr. Roberts (The FIA Medical Delegate) stay the same at all races. I'm sure Bernie could get any crew he wanted written into the contracts for the races.
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The NHRA has done the same since the early 1950's with their outstanding Safety Safari crew.
We know that the top people, like Charlie Whiting and Dr. Roberts (The FIA Medical Delegate) stay the same at all races. I'm sure Bernie could get any crew he wanted written into the contracts for the races.
Yes he could. And no he wouldn't. If (heaven forbid) someone on Bernie's crew screwed up, that would put Bernie on the hook for any legal fall out. The FIA SHOULD take legal responsibility for the safety of everyone at the track. I presume that the FOM contract and the FIA contract are separate documents (even though they go hand in hand).
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The FIA's disclaimer could the signs at every circuit warning people that motorsport can be dangerous.