I agree with your comments. I didn’t mean to come across like a local council… perhaps a senate committe meeting?

I think we are all agreed that racing under a litigious climate, such as is present in Italy would be unworkable. Hopefully the investigation into the accident will shore up the safety features to an even greater extent.

A reduction as much as humanly possible of these horrible events is all we are after.

“The real question is – how can an object weighing almost 1kg have made its way off the mechanism of the car and out of the back into the path of a following car.” Here the mass of the object is irrelevant, if it breaks, it either falls off or is retained by being secured at the other unbroken end. The spring end cones normally retain the spring by an interference fit when at rest. But under compression the spring tends to unwind and lessen it’s grip on the end cones,

In the brawn design if either crank pivot had broken this would have freed the spring at that end, the continuing movement of the crank still attached, would shake it violently until it fell off.

You can only test a crank pin’s breaking point by breaking it, ok you can xray and ultrasound it, but I doubt that is done to turned parts I would guess it is reserved for cast parts only.

BUT as I said in another thread you can’t FMEA the whole car to an infinite level; or you would end up with armour plated boxes with just the wheels sticking out, totally enclosed cockpits bulletproof runflat tyres and airbags, lots of airbags. On the slightest impapct the whole car turns into a bouncy castle.

It was a fluke, we must not act like a local council health and safety officer eager to prevent themselves being sued for all known hazards to anybody even though there is no risk record . Or we will end up not only with all our local fêtes and carnivals banned but with all motor racing banned as well in this our free country.

Absolutely. Raikkonen should have been black flagged. I watched that race with disbelief.

The Stewards normally do an absolutely fantastic job on race weekends, but in this case, their decision to leave the exhaust flapping around, waiting to come off and cause serious damage or injury, was a dangerous joke.

It needn’t have hit another driver physically – running over it would have likely caused damage and possibly a crash.

If you look at the airflow of an F1 car – you can see, particularly visible in the wet – that a massive updraft of air is created in its wake. These massive ‘rooster tails’ of air currents would have projected the spring regardless of the novel system of rear diffuser that Brawn currently use.

Let’s not forget that the ground beneath Rubens Barrichello’s Brawn car was moving at circa 100 miles per hour at the time the spring came off.

The effect on a spring from the rapid movement of the ground from *any* car travelling at this speed would translate that kinetic energy into the spring (which, after all, is designed for storing and re-translating kinetic energy) with ease.

I think the Brawn diffusers can be considered to be almost irrelevant to the situation.

The real question is – how can an object weighing almost 1kg have made its way off the mechanism of the car and out of the back into the path of a following car. Was the failure due to structural loading on a material with inherent flaws, or were the build standards not adhered to when putting this section of the car together for the race?

I am wondering if the infamous Brawn rear diffuser, played a major part in this, blowing the spring higher in the air.

If the spring “dropped” from Ruben’s car it would take less than a second to hit the ground, if it merely “fell”; so it must have been propelled either up or down to still be airborne some 4 seconds later.

I suspect it was ejected with considerable force and after bouncing off the inside of the body and possibly the rear wing it then finally bounced off the track. The timing must indicate that it bounced several times before being released on to the track. OR it was thrown into a high arc, some other spectator videos could verify if this was the case, although the fact that it remained in the same path along the track would lessen the chance of this. (“It’s the time loss factor Scully” as Mulder would say)

It is very uncomfortable viewing, but I have yet to see a full and credible description of what happened during his horrible incident. The footage clearly shows the spring hit his helmet just as he returned his head to face forwards after looking in the right mirror. Judging from his quickly weakened grip on the steering wheel and the decelerating engine note, this rendered him almost instantly unconscious. I believe that relaxed legs in a Formula 1 cockpit would leave the feet resting quite firmly on the throttle and the brake pedals (though not 100%) and this seems to be what happened as the footage shows he was both braking (the front wheels were skidding, but not locked) and applying throttle (the engine revs reduce somewhat before impact due to braking, but remain high after impact).

His lack of consciousness at impact seems to have contributed to the reported basal skull fracture to happen (a very serious injury – poor Felipe was very, very lucky to escape this) as he would not have braced his neck muscles for impact. I’m not sure what part the HANS device played (it is designed to minimise this type of cranial-extensional injury) but surely the FIA will need to look again at the efficacy of this device in the inquiry.

Finally, the graphic image of the helmet shot above illustrates the sheer force of the spring which collapsed the helmet around Felipe’s left eye socket, and the massive force of impact of the 800g spring was able to fracture the fragile bones in this area.

I echo the sentiments of a previous poster who stated how much safer the sport is, and we all know that F1 will never be 100% safe, but let’s hope a solution to errant track debris can be found.

We all hope to see you racing again very soon, Felipe.

Best regards.