What's frustrating in this tragic death is that to a large degree everything went pretty well after the chutes detached. Mark Niver (RIP) did a great job of getting his speed down using the brakes and impressively even under the stress of heavy braking he also did a great job of getting the car centered as it entered the sand pit. Clearly a very skilled and experienced driver was at the hands of the this car, dealing with an adverse situation exactly as he should have.
To my eye the sand did successfully scrub some additional speed off the car before it hit the first net.
But the implementation of the first net was where things went wrong. Given there was still significant length left to the sand pit, the first net should have been much more compliant (stretchy) than it was. Instead it was pretty rigid, and decellerated the car much too quickly, causing the chassis to fold up and endanger the driver.
This was a really unfortunate occurrance, but I think its fixable without a drastic measure like 1/8 mile racing. The first net in these sand pits should be designed to decellerate the cars smoothly over the remaining back half length of the pit. This could be done either by making that first net out of a very stretchy material or by making the attachments for the end of the net be energy absorbing. For example, the ends of the net could be attached to a large spring loaded spool, or some similar system that increases resistance as the attachment extends. When the car hit the net, the spools would allow the net to extend and move with the car but with increasing resistance, smoothly decellerating the car.
The important point is that to minimize the potential damage to the driver you need to decellerate the cars over the largest distance possible, and this means a "compliant net" approach will work much better than any water based or other means of "soft wall" approaches. Those only make sense when you don't have much room to work with (ie 10 feet or so).
In summary, I think the current sand pit implementations could work pretty well if they went to a compliant net at the half pit, and if there is room for it, also a compliant net at the end of the pit (otherwise the last net would have to stay rigid).
It would take some money and resources from the NHRA to design, test and build these new net systems, but I firmly believe that its clearly their responsibility to do so, and I strongly recommend that they start this activity immediately.
Sincerely,
[/URL] This is after a 200+mph flight into the catch fence at Indy this year. Driver sustained a broken leg and cracked vertebrae.
[/URL] This is after a 200+mph flight into the catch fence at Indy this year. Driver sustained a broken leg and cracked vertebrae.
