Keep F1-style
Health & Safety
out of bike racing
T
by Roger Moroney
eam principal of the Red Bull Racing team
Christian Horner came up with a great line
the other night on one of those F1 shows.
“It is just bananas,” he said with only the
most wry of smiles (tinged with grimace)
to accompany that rather quaint opinion.
Of course had he been conversing off-camera and
inside the media-free confines of the team garage his
choice of words may have been a little more colourful.
But he made his point nicely, and I could only
nod and also mumble the word “bananas”.
He was basically talking about what the future of
F1 was set to embrace in terms
of a strange and, it has to be said,
ugly device called a ‘halo’ cockpit
protection device as well as
plans to reduce available engine
numbers for a season to three.
Christian pretty well echoed what
a spokesman for one certain engine
manufacturer had said... that even the present
allowance of four engines a season was not really
enough. He reckoned even though they were only
halfway through the season “half the field has got
a problem.” The decision to move to make it three
engines brought out the “just bananas” line.
I think he has a fair point. As these engines are under
very real stress and it could be said that having to
build just three for a season will actually cost
more money as design and development and
manufacturing would have to be greatly stepped
up to effectively make them more bulletproof.
The FIA’s decision to bring in the three engines
plan, as well as the ‘halo’, has rattled a few teams. It
also clearly rattled the commentary, interviewing
and analysis teams who voiced a string of opinions,
carefully treading a path that would not upset too
many chiefs anywhere. The new protective safety
loop thing had the potential to make the driver
safer in the event of something coming onto the
driving pod he is nestled into, some argued.
But such incidents were actually very rare and
the safety of the present cars had never been
better, others responded. Plus, some added, they
look silly and some drivers had remarked that
having a spar standing vertically in their vision
barely a metre away was not comfortable.
Once upon a time drivers in F1 did not wear seatbelts
and drove with bare hands and bare faces. Crazy stuff,
but the advances in safety through the years have now
made these very powerful machines very safe. I would
have thought pretty much as safe as they can get but
nope, time to put protective ‘halos’ over the cockpit.
While Ferrari said yep, they’d go with that, Horner
said Red Bull would have preferred to go with their
‘aeroscreen’ design if such a device had to be fitted...
but the sport’s governing body said it did not fit the
plan, so the ‘halo’ in all its intrusive ugliness it is.
“Personally I’m not a big fan of the halo,” Horner
said after the British GP. He called it “an inelegant
solution to the problem that it’s trying to deal with”
adding that such things needed
more research time “rather than
rushing something through that
may have other consequences.”
A couple of leading F1 scribes also
waded into the ‘halo’ issue with
one touching on safety in MotoGP.
He said it would be like legislating
to make the likes of Ducati, Honda, Yamaha and
Suzuki fit enveloping safety roll frames to their
racing machines... to make the sport safer.
MotoGP, it was pointed out, and this applies to
every two-wheeled class for that matter, is effectively
untouchable in terms of having the more over-
excitable Health and Safety troops try to
reconfigure them.
It was also pointed out that the pilots of very fast
motorcycles could be seen at work, whereas the
increasingly encroaching cockpits of race cars
effectively turn them into robotic machines.
Driverless cars, basically. Safety is a critical factor
in motorsport but how far do you take it?
I figured the sport was pretty well already there
(given the walk-aways from a few recent major
rally, Nascar and IndyCar offs) but no, still more
plans and accordingly rules to enforce.
But hey, the people who come up with these
ideas and directives would otherwise have nothing
else to do and we can’t have that can we?
KIWI RIDER 77