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Comment by nafey | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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