Racing Harnesses: How Statics Can Keep You Safe When Dynamics Has Other Ideas - Part 2

#RAGEQUIT

In the first part of our discussion on racing harnesses, we covered some basic statics, looked at the geometry of shoulder belt angles, how that impacts the forces that your body sees, and some tips on shoulder belt routing. This time we will take a closer look at lap belts, sub straps, mounting points, and my favorite thing in the world to hate: four point belts! (Seriously, I hate those things. Hate… HATE!)

 

Lap Belts

As with the shoulder belts, lap belts transfer the forces exerted on your body during a crash from your body, into the belts, and finally into the structure of the car. Also, as with shoulder belts, the angle at which those belts are installed can be the difference between surviving an accident unharmed and, well… not unharmed. However, this time the reasons are a bit more straightforward (This means no math. I’m bummed, but I have a feeling that you are probably okay with that.).

Properly installed lap belts must sit on the iliac crest. (No, I’m not a doctor… and no, I won’t look at that rash for you. See here for more info. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliac_crest) That basically means that the lap belts should sit just below the points of your pelvic bone that you can feel on either side near your belt line. (Think about where the waistline of low rise jeans would fall… if you’re into that sort of thing.) This is, for lack of a better term, a ‘structural’ area of the body. In an impact, the forces are transmitted through bone and muscle. If the belts are installed at angles that place them above the iliac crest and high on your abdomen, the forces will be transmitted through those soft, squishy, rather important bits that live between your ribcage and your pelvis. This can cause serious internal bleeding, organ damage, you get the picture…

This tends to be more of a problem for the kind of racer who wore ‘Husky’-sized jeans in middle school. I’ve seen plenty of you big-boy types wear the cam lock damn near up to your sternum. Don’t do this. Readjust the length of your shoulder harnesses if you have to. Make sure the latch sits low!

 

Sub Straps

Ahhh, Sub Straps: not just those things that makes you uncomfortable in your gentleman’s area. At first glance, sub straps seem quite counter intuitive. I’ve just told you that it is never preferable to exert restraining forces with your squishy bits and here we go with a component that looks like it does just that. Well… to some extent, you’d be right. A traditional 5-point harness with a single strap trussing up your wedding veg can induce forces in undesirable portions of your anatomy in a crash. (Or on the grid for that matter.) We at WBF prefer 6-point belts for this very reason. A properly installed 6-point harness will transfer forces around the groin and reduce the risk of injury to your… you know… region.

Ok, so now that we’ve put the colorful euphemisms behind us, lets discuss what a sub strap is really meant to do. It is not just, as you might first assume, to restrain forward movement. Its a bit more complicated than that.

Firstly, it prevents submarining. Submarining is the rotation or sliding of the body under the lap belts. In a forward impact, the body tends to remain in motion (ala Newton… Haha! Science!) and tries to squirt out of the harness along the path of least resistance. In the absence of a sub strap, this path is essentially out the bottom of the harness. A sub strap holds the lower body and keeps you fully restrained by the harness/seat system.

Secondly, as we discussed in the previous article, belts are tension-only members. When your body exerts force on the shoulder harnesses, it tries to move forward and stretch the belt. The belt also tries to go into tension from your shoulder to the latch. With no sub strap restraining it, it will try to pull the cam lock upward until the shoulder belt and lap belt form a straight line. This can allow the cam lock to move up and cause internal injury as described above or, in extreme cases, can impact the upper chest or even the neck. I doubt I need to describe the trouble you would be in if that happened.

As always, belt angles are critical. The sub strap angle for 6-point belts should be vertical down from the crotch or slightly angled rearward. This is a rule-of-thumb and should not be taken as law for all installations. Formula cars, for instance, with extreme lay down angles may require special technologies or installation methods to ensure the same affect. Check with your harness manufacturer for their recommendations.

Do NOT route sub straps over the front of a factory seat. Do NOT position sub straps so that they route under you and out the back of the seat. Both methods introduce the potential for slack in the belts. This means they don’t keep you where they should and cannot properly protect you in an impact! If you have questions about this, the reasoning is the same as in every other discussion we’ve had about belt angles and belts fouling seats or other obstructions. Belts act in tension along a straight path. If they aren’t routed at the correct angle with no restrictions, they will try their damnedest to make that happen. Don’t force them to work against your installation. I promise, you will not like the results!

Anchor Points - Strength

What can I say here? They need to be strong. Like, stupid strong. Don’t let this be the weak point of the installation. It is preferable to build a structure that integrates seat and harness mounts into the cage. If that isn’t feasible, you should at least build a structure into the floorpan that provides reinforcement for the mounts. Commonly available spreader plates are good, but I prefer to strengthen the floor on the topside with a bit of 1”x1”x0.065” square tubing stitch welded to the floor and let the spreader plates span across the tubes.

For lap belts, the factory seat belt attachment points are often a good choice as long as the belt angles work for your setup. Just don’t try to save a little fabrication in exchange for poorly fitting belts. Most factory lap belt locations use a 7/16”-UNF thread and clip-in adapters that thread in to the factory holes are readily available in the aftermarket… just don’t buy some knockoff of unknown metallurgy, and please, for the love of all that is Holy, don’t buy some cast iron bullshit that sort of looks like the real thing from the hardware store and expect it to save you.

Anchor Points - Type

For shoulder belts, 99% of the time it will make the most sense to wrap them around the harness bar. Just follow the manufacturers instructions and the tips laid out in the previous article and you’ll be fine. If you have a purpose built race car that requires bolting your shoulder belts, see below.

We prefer clip in style attachments whenever possible. They provide several features that we like. Belts can be removed, adjusted, and reinstalled without the need for tools, the hardware is designed for this exact application and is load rated, and there is never a risk of the belt binding and “dumping”.

Dumping

Belt dumping is a phenomena that most of us first became aware of after Dale Earnhardt’s fatal crash at Daytona. As we’ve discussed before, a belt is a tension-only member. If it is kinked or held at some angle other than the angle at which the force on it is being applied, it naturally tries to straighten out to match the force.

A quick example: Have you ever picked up a clothes hanger with a pair of pants hanging on the bottom bar when suddenly the pants shift slightly to one side and then suddenly the hanger rotates and the pants slide down to the end of the hanger and into a wadded mess? This is a far less dangerous example of the dumping effect. When the pants slide slightly off center, the force acting on them (gravity) is no longer acting through the center of the hook. Once that force is unbalanced the whole system finds a way to center the force again. The pants slide down, the hanger rotates, and the system finds equilibrium.

If you think of the hook of the hanger as the attachment point of your harness and of the hanger itself as the bracket that attaches the harness to the attachment point, you can see that the bracket must be able to rotate if the tension is to remain constant in the belt. If the bracket is bolted too tight, pinched between the mounting tabs, or for some reason, welded (Why would you do this!? Why?), the bracket cannot rotate and one side of the belt will be loaded unevenly. Why is this undesirable? Have you ever seen someone tear a phonebook in half? They don’t attack the entire thing at once. They pinch a corner and tear a small weak section. Once its started, the whole thing tears much easier. Your belts are the same way. If they are loaded unevenly (even under what would otherwise be an acceptable load) and a small failure begins, the entire belt can tear from this weak spot and the belt can fail in an instant. That is belt dumping and it can be fatal.

Four Point Harnesses

I told you that we’d get to my hatred of these. Hopefully by now, you understand the importance of preventing submarining.

“But what about ASM technology!?”, the internet asked in unison.

ASM technology is essentially a failure point built into 4-point belts designed to give way in an impact. I’ve talked at some length to manufacturers who claim that this technology is safe and effective. Maybe it is… in a laboratory, on a test rig, under controlled conditions, when installed and adjusted by the manufacturer, in a common direction of loading, between noon and 2pm, on Sunday, after Labor Day, when the bells ring…

In theory, I suppose it can be said that it works, but as we have seen in every example so far, controlling the position of the body relative to the harness is critical. When the belt is counted on to fail as part of its standard operation, I cannot be convinced that it will perform in a satisfactory manner every time. As an instructor, I have upset more than my share of students be refusing to use their 4-points, opting instead for the factory 3-point belts.

“But what about a roll over with a fixed seat and a harness and no roll hoop!?”, the internet inquired incessantly.

This is the point of the conversation where a very honest discussion of risk begins. It is true that a factory system is engineered to keep the driver as safe as possible during a roll over event. The seat backs, belt tensioners, headrests, airbags, and all the rest are designed as a system to work in unison by some very smart, very well educated people. At this point, you must ask, “What are the limitations of the factory design?” “Did those very smart people ever assume that I’d be going 140mph down the back straight at Road Atlanta?” The truth is, if you are driving a road car on a race track, you are most likely operating it outside of the parameters for which it was designed.

What does that mean to you? Should you trust the work of the OEM in a range outside of their design envelope? Should you defer to another group of very smart, very well educated people who have developed racing safety standards over the years and put in a full cage, fixed back seat, harness, HANS (or equivalent), etc.? Should you operate on your own and mix and match bits and pieces from both systems making assumptions about your personal exposure to risk and hope that it all goes well when it all goes to hell?

We can’t make that decision for you. The best we can do is give you some knowledge and hope you can use it to better inform your choices. As for us, for open track use, we recommend (at a minimum) the following:

• 6-point Harness (Properly installed! You should be an expert by now.)
• Fixed back seat with rear seat mount. (Yes, even for FIA seats. See the new Racetech models for examples.)
• HANS device or any similar SFI 38.1 approved device.
• Rear Cage (Roll hoop with harness bar, diagonal bar, and rear stays.)

Conclusion

Has this all been heavy enough for you? Are you confused? Have I successfully pissed you off? Are you presently smashing your keyboard in a hate-fueled rage?

Yeah, we know… people have some pretty strongly held beliefs about this sort of thing. Don’t like what we have to say on the matter? That’s ok, but don’t just depend on the wisdom of the Facebook masses to inform your decisions about the right gear and how to install it. The manufacturers will help you. Your retailer (if they are a reputable motorsports gear shop) will help you. Don’t depend on hearsay, tribal knowledge, or what the guy next to you in the paddock says. Please use what we’ve presented here and in the previous article, ask your suppliers the hard questions, and above all, plan for the worst to happen. You’ll forget all about the extra money you spent on your safety gear if you ever have to use it.

Racing Harnesses: How Statics Can Keep You Safe When Dynamics Has Other Ideas - Part 1

#mathjoke

In the first of our promised tech-heavy safety related articles, we will discuss proper harness installation. Just as a warning (or perhaps an apology), the WavingBearFlag.com staff all have engineering backgrounds. (Although only one of us is actually an engineer. #theLEAgue!) Throughout this article and those to follow, you will need at least a little knowledge about mathematics, geometry, engineering mechanics, mechanics of materials , quantum mechanics, haberdashery, phrenology, and basket weaving… I may have gotten a bit carried away there, but you get the idea. We will attempt to give a simplified primer on the physical phenomena involved with each article at the beginning so anyone without a technical background can hopefully understand what we are on about. We are not here to confuse anyone or to get into lengthy debates about physics and we are certainly not the absolute final authority on any subject we present. We only want to arm our readers with some tools and knowledge to ask the right questions when they go to their builder or safety gear supplier so you can be sure that you get the right gear for your situation and that it is installed correctly. If you find fault with our materials, do please let us know. We will always strive to present the best and most accurate information we can find!

Primer

Lets begin with a discussion of Statics. Statics is a subset of engineering mechanics that is concerned with the distribution of forces through rigid bodies at rest.

Having fun yet?

To simplify, imagine a cable suspended from the ceiling. From that cable, we hang a 100# weight. (A note for pedants: Yes, I’m using the terms weight and pounds. I know the mass and weight and force are not all necessarily interchangeable. Don’t like it? Extoll the virtues of the kilonewton and *shudder* the slug on your own website. #MultiplyByG)

For the purposes of statics, the ceiling and the cable are both ‘rigid bodies’. That means the ceiling doesn’t sag and the cable doesn’t stretch. Consideration of those factors would be handled in the next step of design and we won’t concern ourselves with them here… though just wait until my rant about CrMo! Also, for the purposes of statics, we will say that the weight isn’t swinging around or spinning or bouncing up and down. It is ‘at rest’.

One of the key principles of statics is that all forces acting on a rigid body at rest must be equal and opposite, otherwise the rigid body wouldn’t be at rest. It would be moving in the direction of some unbalanced force. For our first example, that means that if you have 100# pulling down, the cable has 100# of tension acting on it, and the attachment point at the ceiling is resisting the downward force with a 100# vertical force.

Pretty simple stuff.

Lets make it a bit more complicated.

Lets say that we have a pulley and cable arranged as below.

We have the same 100# pulling straight down, but now that 100# must be distributed into each side of the cable and into the two ceiling mounts. For slightly more complex mathematical reasons that I want to get into here and due to the fact that the load is centered between the supports, each ceiling bracket resists the load with 50# of vertical upward force each, but what about the horizontal resisting forces? The bad news? These reactions certainly exist, but finding their values isn’t as intuitive. The good news? Geometry time!

First, we can find the tension in the cables. We know at the supports, there is a 50# force acting vertically upward. That means that the cable on each side must be exerting a 50# force acting downward. Since a cable can only carry a force along its length, there must be a horizontal force as well. As is works out, the relationship between the forces is the same as the relationship between the horizontal and vertical distances travelled by the cable.

Using the trigonometric functions (huzzah!) that we all pretended to learn in 10th grade, we can find the tension (T) in the cable and also the horizontal force at the ceiling.

So, the whole system looks like:

Since the horizontal and tension forces vary with the angle, you can see that any change in the angle will affect those forces also. More on this later.

Harness Angles

Race harnesses are nylon belts that restrain a driver or passenger in a vehicle and transmit forces exerted by the driver or passenger in an impact through the belts in tension (you can’t really compress a belt along its length. Give Euler a google if you want to know why) and into the structure of the car. Nylon belts do stretch a bit, but we’ll leave that to the manufacturers and say, for the purposes of this discussion, that they act as ‘rigid bodies’. Also, just because there are lots of things moving in an undesirable fashion during an accident doesn't mean that properly installed and worn belts won't stay basically where they are meant to, so we can say that they are ‘at rest’. Since we can use our newfound geometry skills on the belt system, it becomes clear that belt angles change the forces inside the belts. As you’ll soon see, they also change the forces exerted on your body.

So, what does this mean for you? It means that you can buy a very expensive set of belts, install them with all the right hardware, double check all of your connection points, but if you don’t install them at the correct angles, you can turn your belts into force MULTIPLIERS on certain parts of your body! Most notably, your spine.

Typically, belt manufacturers tell you to mount the shoulder belts not more than 20* from horizontal behind the seat.

This is one of the most ignored and probably misunderstood details of belt mounting. I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen belts that turn down at an extreme angle from the driver’s shoulder. This seems to give people a sense of security. On the surface, I suppose it does seem to make some sense. When you strap the belts down in this arrangement, you are pushed into the seat. You feel like a part of the car. The problem is, you have just set yourself up for massive spinal compression in an accident.

Lets take a moment to draw up what is really happening with your shoulder harnesses in an accident and apply the rules of statics.

In a front collision, the car slows rapidly. Newton tells us that a body in motion (in this case YOUR body) tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force. The shoulder harness provides this outside force… at least for the top half of your body. More on the rest of you later.

So the deceleration that you experience applies a forward force and throws you into the belts.

This force is distributed through the shoulder, lap, and antisubmarine belts and into the car’s structure. If we draw a free body diagram (that’s a fancy-pants engineering term for a sketch showing all the forces) at the driver’s shoulder, you get the following:

When you consider all the forces that are acting at the driver’s shoulder, you see that the deceleration force is acting horizontally forward (we’ll assume a front end collision), the force in the piece of the shoulder belt that goes over the driver’s chest goes to zero since Mr. Euler won’t let it take a compression force (This assumption is not entirely accurate, but without a detailed analysis of frictional forces, deflections, and other data that I do not have at my disposal, we will model the shoulder as a pin where all the forces act together. Assuming that there would be an additional tension force through the forward section of the shoulder belt leading to the cam lock would only serve to amplify the affect we will observe, so the method here should be conservative.), and the force in the shoulder belt going from the driver to the car is tension along the length of the belt. If we consider the spine to be a rigid link from the driver’s shoulder to the bottom of the seat at some angle (I’ve chosen 20* since that it pretty common for most full bodied cars), there will also be some force acting along its length.

The actual magnitude of the deceleration force is the function of many, many variables, but one we are most concerned with is the g-loading on the driver’s body. This is a convenient unit of acceleration as a multiple of the normal acceleration due to gravity. (Yes, yes. I know, only on Earth, near sea level, during a full moon, when the bells ring… Are you still here? Shouldn’t you be huddled in your basement somewhere composing a snarky blog post about my last messy treatment of physics vocabulary?) See http://www.formula1-dictionary.net/g_force.html for a good explanation. That said, whatever the force caused by the impact is, it will likely be substantial. Since we know that the belt angle affects the belt tension and reaction forces from our earlier work, lets take a look at how varying the shoulder belt angle from 0* to 60* affects the belt tension and spinal compression forces. For the sake of nice round numbers in this example, we’ll say that the deceleration force is 1000 units.

Don’t be intimidated by the math here. It’s actually pretty simple stuff. As we said before, all the forces must equal zero if nothing is moving, so I’ve totaled up the forces in each direction. Sx and Bx are the horizontal components of the belt and spine forces, and Sy and By are the vertical components. After a bit of algebra, you can see that the vertical component of the compression force acting on the spine is equal to the vertical component of the tensile force acting on the shoulder belt. This is important! Without continuing any further, it becomes apparent that a more extreme angle in the shoulder belt means more compression force in the driver’s spine in an impact. Lets carry it a bit farther and see how much the angle will amplify that force.

Still awake? Good. I’ve tabulated all the forces and their components for our range of angles. As you can see below, even a small downward angle on the shoulder belts can cause a significant increase in the forces that the spine can see in an impact!

At a harness belt angle of 60* down, the compression force on the spine can be as much as 81% of the deceleration force acting at the shoulders! 

Seat Backs

So, now it is clear why the belt manufacturers suggest a flat or very nearly flat arrangement for the aft section of the shoulder harness. The next obvious question is: how can we ensure that we get the appropriate angle? To answer this, lets take it step by step from the top of the driver’s shoulder to the ultimate attachment point.

The first potential area for interference is the seat back. The center of the holes in the seat back should align with the shoulder belts when the driver is strapped in at the installed angle of the seat. The harness should not ‘break over’ the hole in the seat for any reason. Ideally, the shoulder belts should not touch the seat opening at all. If routed incorrectly, the belt will try to exert a force into the seat opening in an impact. This changes the angle of the belt and, as we have seen, changes the forces acting on the body. It can also chafe the belt causing damage, cause damage to the seat and, in extreme instances, it could cause failure of the belt in an impact.

Furthermore, if using harnesses with a factory seat (which I don’t recommend for reasons that we will cover in a future article), make sure that the shoulder belts can route either around or between the headrest supports and still maintain the correct geometry. You should not use a seat without a headrest and you should never allow the shoulder belts to pass around the sides of the headrest.

Next in the chain is the span between the seatback and the harness connection point. This is typically to a harness bar. Ideally, this will be integrated into a full roll cage, but a less complete structure may be adequate for proper harness installation. Look for a future article on harness bars. The shoulder harnesses should route rearward parallel to the axis of the car. The distance between the shoulder and the attachment point should be as short as is practical. Some manufacturers allow long distances between the shoulder and the attachment point and may recommend narrowing or even crisscrossing the belts in this arrangement. We don’t like this method if it can be avoided. Remember that even though we modelled the belts as ‘rigid bodies’ for the purposes of our analysis, they do stretch when loaded. To minimize the risk of a piece of the system moving is an undesirable fashion, we feel that the belt lengths should be kept as short as possible.

Finally, is the attachment point. Since the rules on this apply to all belt anchor locations, we’ll consider them in our next article when we look at lap and anti-submarine belts.

Again, this is not intended as an all-inclusive guide, but we hope that you can use the principles presented here when you begin shopping for safety gear and, perhaps just as importantly, when you begin your installation. All questions and comments (not related to gravitational acceleration) are always welcomed.

The Launch

On 04 August 2015 I wrote an article on Opposite Lock detailing my experience at Road Atlanta on the weekend that Glenn Dick, Jr. was killed in a DE accident there. It was written mostly out of the frustration that I felt seeing so many advanced DE and TT cars without what I think is adequate safety gear. I was astounded by the response. It was something like 37,000 views, 500 shares, and 3,000 likes in the span of about a day. Suddenly what was meant as a late-night unload that I doubted would be read by more than a couple hundred people on Oppo was on damn near every automotive forum you could think of and was being picked up and linked to by everyone from track friends to Fox Sports. I never intended for it to receive a wide audience and I am far from a journalist or professional writer, but thankfully it garnered some attention and hopefully changed some attitudes about safety gear, personal responsibility for safety, and the trackday culture in general.

Because of the response to the first article, I have decided to change the mission of this website. It was started as a place for a few local racers and me to share funny stories from the track, videos, and to host a memorial to some close friends lost in an auto accident. Now it will serve primarily as a repository for tech-heavy articles about track safety. The first installment, since it kicked this whole thing off, will be the original Oppo article. We will follow up regularly with new articles that will, hopefully, better educate and prepare our readers to safely and confidently hone their skills at the track without undue risk.

AT

http://oppositelock.kinja.com/fatal-accident-at-road-atlanta-1721931526

Fatal Accident at Road Atlanta

Adam Thomas

04 August 2015

Saturday, I stood in the paddock at Road Atlanta as a medical helicopter landed to tend to an HPDE 2 driver who had crashed on the back straight. We all hoped for the best, but assumed the worst. When the last race and final two DE sessions of the day were cancelled, that told me everything I needed to know.

As I understand it, 56 year old Glenn Dick, Jr.’s SN95 Mustang sustained driver’s side damage and Mr. Dick succumbed to his injuries.

This hits home for me for several reasons:

1. I was instructing an HPDE 1 student in a similar car last weekend. We hadn’t received word on the result of Saturday’s accident, but I had to get in the right seat with a student who was beginning to show some speed protected only by a helmet, a three point retractable seat belt, and some two-decade old stamped sheet metal.

2. A good friend of mine had an identical car to the one involved in the accident. Same engine even the same color. Everyone in our core group from the track had driven that car at Road Atlanta at 130+. We’ve placed ourselves in the same danger countless times.

The difference? The race driver in me wants to say that we are better. We have more skill. More talent. We would have reacted quicker. We would have done something different.

That, of course, is just so much macho bullshit we tell ourselves so we can keep going out there. The truth? We are more fortunate. Nothing more.

3. I lost my two best friends in January 2014 in a car accident. We owned a shop together prepping, building, and repairing track and race cars. They were test driving a customer’s TTU C6 Z06 after replacing the clutch.

The short story is: they lost control about 1/8 mile from the shop, struck a tree, and were killed instantly. The part of the story that is relevant here is that this TTU car had over 600hp, would lap Road Atlanta in 1:29, and had a race seat and a harness bar as its only safety upgrades.

The Value of HPDE

The entire concept of the tiered HPDE structure that most competent track organizations employ is spectacular and is quite unique in the motorsports world. We give classroom training to new drivers then put trained instructors in the car with students to reinforce and build upon that knowledge. We build drivers. We instill good habits. We reprogram drivers to react based on the unfailing physics that will control their situation rather than allow them to react in the typical way that people do when things feel uncomfortable: by hitting the brake. 

Most people think that instructors are there to make them fast. In our world, that just isn’t so. We teach them to be safe. They learn the line, the flags, how to pass, and be passed, then we move them on. There are people who specialize in race instruction, car setup, data acquisition and analysis. We are not them.

I’ve been instructing for 9 years with various organizations. I’ve sat shotgun in everything from Camrys to 640hp 911s. My students have included teenagers, stubborn middle-aged gold chainers, and geriatrics and aside from one young soldier just back from being shot at for a year in Iraq and thoroughly convinced of his immortality, I’ve never been anything close to scared in the right seat.

Typically the students are so nervous and overwhelmed that, even in the fastest of cars, they are so far from the limit early on that it is difficult to stay awake. As they build good habits, the speed builds. As a rule, by the time they are fast enough to worry you, they are ready to find more speed on their own... then there is a gap.

The Gap

This is the part of the story where I become much less confident in my own analysis of things and far less capable of offering an ideal solution, but I can state a problem that I see with the HPDE model.

Once drivers pass from instructed driving to solo driving they are still monitored by the sanctioning body. There are still classroom sessions and on-track drills are common. Side-by-side sessions and passing drills allow for some guidance, but for the most part, each driver takes control of his own development. By now drivers are hooked. They are addicted to achieving the next goal and bolting on the next mod. Brakes fade, so they buy better brakes, the new brakes overpower the old tires so they go next. The new tires tax the old sway bars and bushings so they go too and suddenly lap times have plummeted. What safety upgrades are required to accompany this newfound speed? Nothing. Until the jump to wheel to wheel racing where a roll cage and full safety gear are compulsory, factory belts and a recent helmet are still good enough. In this gap between novice and racer there are incremental increases in speed but not in required safety equipment.

Maybe this is good enough. Everyone involved knows that motorsports is inherently dangerous and it is the responsibility of each individual to ensure that they are as safe as they feel they need to be. Even for wheel to wheel racing, minimum safety requirements are just minimums. You can buy better suits, lighter helmets, and thicker roll cage tubing. I don’t think that we should be setting maximum lap times before requiring cages or harnesses or anything else and I’m sure the promoters aren’t at all excited about the thought of adding costs that might be prohibitive for their customers but maybe we can focus more on safety. Maybe we can include crash test videos, explanations of the function and operation of each piece of safety gear, and case studies of fatal accidents as part of higher level HPDE classroom instruction. I don’t want to frighten any new drivers away from this sport. It is difficult to promote track events as it is, but if we are as instructors meant to build safe drivers, perhaps we should look beyond the end of our last session on Sunday afternoon and give our students the knowledge to keep themselves safe and maybe even a little dose of fear of what can happen in the worst case scenario.

We can do better and I’m sure we will. We owe that to the sport, and more importantly, we owe it to the next driver who will have that unexpected accident but who will walk away from it.

Godspeed, Glenn Dick Jr.

Update: A safety gear supplier does offer classes on the purpose and use of safety gear for DE students for the group that hosted this event. My remarks on training needs were meant to be broader in scope and inclusive of all track day organizations.