Hey reddit! So i guess you have all seen the video of a F1 driver surviving in fire for that long. And that crash was hard to watch, but everybody in the comments were talking about some halo that saved that drivers life. What is that and how does it work?
In: Engineering
It’s a 20 pound titanium ring that has a support sloping up in the front and runs over the driver’s head
It’s supposed to protect against stuff coming up the front by pushing it over the top and protects against straight down stuff like when a car flips or has another car land on top of it
The drivers basically sit in a strong pod while the rest of the car will disintegrate around them to protect them
F1 cars like Indy Car are open cockpit which means there’s no cockpit frame or crash structure surrounding the drivers head to protect them in a crash. It’s just their head and crash helmet poking out from the chassis.
The Halo is a titanium and carbon fiber tube that surrounds the drivers head to prevent certain types of debris and impacts from hitting them.
In the case of today the Halo prevented Grosjean’s head from hitting the Techpro barrier directly, which would have certainly killed him.
Jules Bianchi was killed in a similar incident years before when his F1 car struck a tractor that was recovering another vehicle. His car plowed underneath the tractor and his head struck the tractor frame giving him a massive brain injury which eventually killed him.
Similar María de Villota was test driving a Murassia F1 car and plowed underneath a trailer which resulted in a similar head injury. She survived but lost an eye in the crash, and died suddenly months later from a related blood clot.
I think it was Fittipaldi that was killed when struck in the head by a bouncing tire at Indy. Having a halo on his Indy car would have absorbed the hit and he would have survived.
One of the major concerns that led to the halo was another car landing on top of yours, which is exactly what happened at Spa in 2012, ironically it was Grosjean’s car that flew over Alonso’s car and nearly decapitated him. Alonso survived unscathed, but was within inches of being killed. The halo would have prevented that possible injury as well.
Felipe Massa was struct in the head by a spring at the Hungaroring in 2009. He suffered a significant head injury as a result and was knocked unconscious with his foot on the accelerator. He survived, but they changed the helmet design after that to help prevent similar injuries. There’s also a 50/50 chance the the halo would have deflected the spring.
Grojean probably would have been fine without the halo, but it is a carbon fibre ring that lops around above the drivers head
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