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Comment by singhkays | Hacker News Reader

> After hitting the guardrail at about 137mph (220km/h), Grosjean's car ripped in half and then burst into flames—something that hasn't happened for over 30 years. To make matters worse, the front half penetrated between the guardrails that lined this section of track. As crashes go, this one was more reminiscent of the bad-old days of F1, the kind that claimed the lives of drivers like Roger Williamson or Francois Cevert.

This.....just sounds so horrific and a nightmare scenario for the driver. At that speed I wonder how much of a sense a driver has of going through this experience vs it's over in an instant. Overall, it's a testament to engineering, that a person can walk away alive from a crash like this.

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I've spun off the track going about 50mph before and my dad's spun at about 120mph. We both agree that there's a split second where you realize something's gone wrong but after that your training kicks in and you take your hands off the wheel/push in the brake/clutch. The spin itself doesn't exactly happen instantaneously, but it feels like it's over pretty quick. Once the car stops it can take a second or two to get your bearings, figure out which way the car is facing, etc.

> Overall, it's a testament to engineering, that a person can walk away alive from a crash like this.

Not just to engineering, but also the training and performance of all the track stewards - first person to put a fire extinguisher on the wreck was 7 (!) seconds after the crash. That's unbelievably fast.

Grosjean survived due to every person and every piece of technology working exactly as they should.

> Grosjean survived due to every person and every piece of technology working exactly as they should.

I think this misses a couple of key points. The only reason his car tore in half and caught fire was because the barrier failed spectacularly. It’s absolutely not supposed to do that. LeClerc had a bigger crash in Monza this year, and it wasn’t nearly as dramatic. So this incident was caused by a piece of safety technology failing catastrophically, with a whole bunch of other safety tech working as intended to save his life.

Also it’s good the marshals and medical crew were there so quickly (as the medical car follows the pack on the first lap). But they basically contributed nothing to Grosjean’s survival. He was completely engulfed in flames for 18 seconds. He survived because his flame protection worked (he got his burns from using his hands to climb over the hot barrier, not from exposure to flames), and because he wasn’t incapacitated by the crash. If he had been knocked unconscious or injured too badly to move, he would have burnt to death in there. The couple of fire extinguishers they had on the car weren’t doing anything to a fire of that size.

Can you please explain how the barrier failed in a bit more detail?

It caught his nose between one of the ribbons of rail. That caused his car to pierce the barrier instead of having its energy dissipated.

Also there is a theory that the pole holding up the rails didnt shear off at all and thats why the car got snapped in half.

I'd say it's didn't necessarily fail, it was just a bad design. It consisted of steel posts in the ground, with stamped steel sections running horizontally. Grosjean's car got wedged in between two of the horizontal rails. It actually succeeded in stopping the 150 mph car from flying off into the desert. In comparison, a smooth concrete barrier would cause the car to just slide along it (hopefully).

Well you’d expect the barrier to either be rigid enough to survive the impact (like a concrete barrier would) and have the cars safety features absorb the impact, or to crumple in a way that absorbs the impact. To me it seems like the Armco is just a bad barrier for that part of the track, because when he hit it, his car penetrated between the horizontal parts of the barrier, but the chassis was torn in half when it encountered resistance from the upright support beam (which really should have given way as well).

I don’t know if this Armco wasn’t up to spec, but the way this barrier performed, it made the crash as bad is it could possibly have been. Compare this crash to LeClerc binning it at a similar speed/angle into the tire barrier at Monza.

https://youtu.be/K0WzAatudAo

It seems that literally any other sort of barrier would have performed better here, and since this is a fast part of the track, you’d typically expect this to be something that had already been considered.

I don’t think there was anything defective with the Armco barrier. It just turned out to be the wrong thing for that part of the track.

It seems to me that the concrete barrier they erected after cutting out the broken section wouldn’t be a great thing to drive into at 140mph, either. I’m curious to see if they have tires in place there next weekend.

Incidentally, I’m pretty sure areas where the Armco rail can’t be replaced with something safer and more modern due to space constraints are the reason some classic tracks are not rated by the FIA as safe for F1. I think that’s part of the problem with Watkins Glen.

I agree, I think tires or barrels would be a much better choice for that barrier. But I think the concrete is an improvement, because at that angle you’d expect it to deflect at least some of the force, but it’s pretty borderline.

> Incidentally, I’m pretty sure areas where the Armco rail can’t be replaced with something safer and more modern due to space constraints are the reason some classic tracks are not rated by the FIA as safe for F1.

A lot of classic tracks wouldn’t get grade 1 status if they were built today, some of them are just kept on the calendar because they’re too classic to remove. Monaco and Spa are two examples. I don’t think they’d drop Spa, and they’re certainly not going to drop Monaco, but those circuits are not up to modern safety standards.

I feel like keeping a classic, great track like Spa (and a classic, mediocre track like Monaco) in spite of the danger is a valid decision for the sport. I wish there was another F1 race on the calendar for North America, and as long as it wasn’t dangerous for the spectators, there’d be something to be said for using one of the old tracks.

I completely agree. This year has shown how good some of these classic circuits still are. Especially compared to some of the terrible modern circuits like Sochi or Yas Marina. I’m concerned that they’ll continue to drop old circuits in favour of new terrible ones that have some big financial backing. I could happily never watch another Abu Dhabi GP again, but I’d be very sad if they went ahead with the plans to drop Interlagos for the new tilkedrome they were planning to build.

The modern tracks (I guess they're mostly Tilke tracks?) vary in quality more than they should, but I am not opposed to building new tracks on principle. You named two boring, bad ones, but Circuit of the Americas is as good as anyone had any right to expect, given how high-profile and political the effort was. Marina Bay is so objectively awful that it has a certain charm. Baku is the greatest street circuit to come along in a long time (and I'm willing to argue about it :) ).

Some of the classic American tracks would bring unique challenges to F1, and that would be interesting to see. I have to admit that some of my thinking in this area is a little sadistic... it would be entertaining to see F1 teams try to survive driving at Sebring. The Indycar teams practice there, and their cars can barely do it.

In any case, another race in NA on the first half of the calendar, around the time of Montreal, would make a lot of sense. Last year the teams literally shipped everything from France to Quebec and, immediately after the race, shipped everything back from Quebec to France. Driving south a few hours to race in New York would make sense.

The problem is that when somebody comes along with huge amounts of money and some terrible ideas, F1 can't help but give them a slot on the calendar. Tilke gets a bad rap for this, but tbh he's mostly not to blame (he has made some incredible circuits, as you mentioned). Sochi, Yas and Hanoi are all terrible though (thankfully we never will get a race in Hanoi).

I'm against the idea because there are so many good tracks to host races at, and I don't trust them to build new ones that are any good. They've proven that they're more than happy to put on boring races for anybody who has enough money. The fact that Abu Dhabi is the last race on the calendar, and that they're planning to put Saudi Arabia right behind it guarantees that having an exciting title-deciding season end is just logistically impossible now. I mean, is there a single person in the world who thinks that KSA is going to have a decent circuit?

>Baku is the greatest street circuit to come along in a long time

Why?

I think the formula is just absurdly long. fast straights combined with extremely tight and narrow turns - so narrow that they are honestly pretty borderline for F1. The race there ends up having an awful lot of passing and eventfulness, which doesn’t sound like much unless you look at pretty much all the other current F1 street courses.

Thanks for the comment.

I really like baku because of the straights and especially the fact of the narrowness of the track. But I believe with those very long chassis, it's quite hard to see wheel to wheel overtakes overthere.

I don't know statistically how much overtaking happens there (F1 fandom being what it is, I'm sure someone keeps track of that stuff) but the racing tends to be exciting to watch.

It's apparently a good track for teammate battles, with closely matched drivers in evenly matched cars. The Mercedes guys pushing one another in 2019, or the Red Bull guys crashing into each other in 2018, were both pretty memorable. Lots of low-speed tangles there in general, and it's also a pretty challenging track for drivers trying to get their fastest lap in practice or qualifying. (there's always more time to be had, but there are also a number of walls arguing against pushing too hard)

It's probably rare for a street course to offer so many options for how to set the car up, too, thanks to the long straight. There's a lot to be said for a slower, high downforce setup with all those right angle turns, but on the straight, Bottas went 235MPH there (!!!) in a practice when he driving for Williams.

Here is a video that covers that "good" barriers supposed to do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkpvPWB3jMk .

They supposed to slow down (gracefully, not 50G we saw) and contain the car. Different corners (slow/fast) use different designs. Barrier technically failed at both tasks. You can argue that ripping the car in half was containing, but that wasn't supposed to happen.

> Not just to engineering, but also the training and performance of all the track stewards - first person to put a fire extinguisher on the wreck was 7 (!) seconds after the crash. That's unbelievably fast.

The crash was at an access road for one, but the bigger part of being there so fast is thanks in part to the medical car that stages on the track and starts with the cars, but behind the field. They follow the racers around for the first lap so that they’re almost immediately at the scene of any crash.

I have crashed with my cart pretty bad. At some point I realized that I will go off track and looked where it will be going. I remember looking for a way out but then I saw the wall and took my hands off the wheel right before impact. It was over pretty quickly and most what I did was just instincts from driving. Only after the crash I put everything together consciously. I would imagine the same for Grosjean. It’s all automated responses.

Why is taking your hands of the wheel such a good thing to do in a situation like this? Is it because the spin of the vehicle would be over with sooner if you let it have its way?

It's because the driving wheel jerk from the front wheels being forced to turn will break your thumbs and/or other fingers.

You instinctively take your hands off the wheel if you have raced karts enough to get into a crash where you hurt your thumbs, that or you've trained to do it.

I even do it on racing sims some times, completely out of instinct.

it's to prevent injuries to your thumbs/wrists.

Everyone’s talking about go karts (and older cars) but this is not the problem with modern drive by wire cars (in an emergency my car will shutdown the electronic steering module which will only give me like 10 degrees of steering, lock-to-lock). The real issue is with the airbag destroying your hands/wrists and chemical burns that come along with it.

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