RIP Dan Wheldon

m4a1mustang · 10-17-2011, 08:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pharmacist

I'm not a fan of IRL so i really don't watch it much. But seeing the clips of the accident, I'm amazed at how badly those cars disintegrate upon impact. You don't see that in F1. Maybe the greater speeds play a role, but F1 cars are built around a superstrong carbon fibre tub and encloses and protects the driver in an accident. Do they have the same in IRL?

It's the same in the IRL. The difference in F1 is that the impacts are almost always significantly slower and they tend to hit soft barriers and 99% of the time any hard impacts are almost always single-car incidents. F1 just doesn't have the same wheel-to-wheel style competition as IRL or NASCAR, so you don't have as many significant incidents.

Another consideration is that a number of these cars hit the catch fencing, which is going to rip a car apart regardless of its construction. Especially at 200+ mph. If an F1 car or even a stock car would hit the fencing at that speed it would be a similar result.

Take a look at Robert Kubica's crash in Montreal back in 2007. The car hit an exposed wall and disintigrated, much like the indy cars. The only difference being that he just hit a wall and not the fence, which would have ripped his car to shreds.