The Halo which is coming in this year, obviously
safety is important, where do you see it going
? do you see completely closed cockpits ?
I will be honest I am not a massive fan of
the Halo, I think on 1 side if you go down
the path if it saves 1 life then it’s worth
it yes, but on the flip side ascetics are
important in motorsport. Motor racing is an
emotional thing and in order to attract fans.
I still look at a Jordan 191 and think ‘that
is 1 of the most beautiful race cars I have
ever seen’ and I will still spend 20 minutes
staring at it because it is a beautiful race
car and I think you cannot under estimate
that from a fans perspective stand point.
As a driver, at the end of the day every driver
accepts the risks, I never felt under pressure
to get in a race car, I was never forced to
get in a race car, I did it voluntarily. Excepting
that you might have an injury, get hurt or
something worse. Ultimately if you don’t
like those risks then go do something else
and I think it is a very tricky balance as
on 1 side the FIA job is to keep the sport
safe and on the flip side you have to balance
it with the ascetics of it all and too me
it does not look like a completed solution
and if you are going to do it build a closed
cockpit. There is a prototype somewhere here
I saw earlier here, the Le-Man cars, they
look beautiful, I don’t think anybody would
say that a La-Man car with a closed cockpit
is an ugly car, they look fantastic. If you
are going to go down that path you might as
well research it and go the whole hog, otherwise
I am a bit of a purist and a traditionalist
and this half way solution does not quite
work for me.
It’s like going back in time you get this
big space frame thing around the top of the
chassis to a very highly engineered, technical
material covered in carbon fibre. From my
point of view I don’t think you will ever
get a catch all situation which will not catch
every accident. The Halo will be very good
if a wheel or an upright tyre is coming at
you but smaller debris I worry about it getting
trapped inside the halo between the head rest
and the halo. It’s a bit sad we look at
formula 1 cars stepped nose sections and it
looks fairly ugly and I would have liked them
to change the geometry of the chassis and
changed the regulations and it meant the front
of the car was a bit more of a ramped section
and get rid of that stupid hump section on
the flat top chassis because it does not matter
who you are they do look horrible and I think
you could put a fairly low deflector on their
which would help with a lot to reduce a lot
of stuff including wheels and tyres, springs
which hit felipe Massa in Hungry and bits
of debris. I am worried about a wing coming
off a car and coming up and getting caught
in the halo and it cannot come out again.
There is never a right way or a wrong way
as Karun chandhok says if it saves 1 life
then so be it but it’s not the best solution
I believe in any way. These teams make new
chasses every year so they change the chassis
geometry and so if there was a type of ramp
thing in front of the driver it would not
be that difficult.
I think fundamentally if you made it an optional
thing every driver would say no because it
adds 7, 8, 9 kilograms or something like that,
maybe more. It’s high up for the centre
of gravity and I’m sure as Gary can tell
you much more than me that it is not good
for aerodynamic flow.
Well it’s no good for aerodynamics and it’s
a small disadvantage but nothing the engineers
cannot overcome that but the problem is more
like 14 or 15 kilograms, it’s very high
up so it is not going to do the tyres any
good, obviously the lap time will suffer because
of the mass of the car and 10 kilograms of
fuel in the car is about 3 tenths of a second
slower per lap and when you put more fuel
in a car you actually lower the centre of
gravity because the first part of the fuel
is below the centre of gravity so you actually
lower the centre of gravity whereas with this
head rest , this 14 kilograms or so that high
up you never lower the centre of gravity.
This will all be worse for the car itself
so engineering wise it’s not nice for an
engineer to try and optimise it and ascetically
it’s pretty poor.
It’s an intermediate step like Karun chandhok
said, it’s the most ready solution at this
time that they want to introduce. We have
tried a few screens designs like the ones
we saw on the Redbull and the one we saw of
the Ferrari and I think they look better but
they had there only problems. I think the
Redbull screen failed in its FIA test and
the Ferrari screen made Vettel feel sick at
Silverstone.
I got a bit dizzy, forward vision is not very
good and its because of the curvature you
get quite a bit of distortion.
I just want to add one thing, we can all drive
a car with a windscreen in front of us and
Karun has driven round in the dark with a
dirty windscreen at 200 mph. The thing is
you get used to it and for Vettel to go out
and made me sick at Silverstone I think that
is pretty poor. You try to do something to
go forward and for one driver or a driver
to a turn around and say that, this screen
had some distortion, this was just a prototype.
As you said earlier look at some of these
companies sitting around here with cars they
look gorgeous they have a good screen there.
They need a carbon around the top, like a
halo in a way to support having the screen
it’s all possible, I think it’s a very
lame excuse saying I have a thing in front
of me so I cannot drive because it made me
sick, we all drove here today with a windscreen
Sources from
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18279652c
Sky F1
