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I think some sort of "windshield"/ open canopy would work. My only concerns with a closed canopy is what happens if a guy's upside down and the car's on fire? How does he get out if it can't open properly?

Still, freak accidents will always happen. We've even had an Xfinity Series driver in NASCAR get hit with something, and it's a closed cockpit car.

FIA set to carry out closed cockpit tests.

http://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/fia-s ... kpit-tests

Yesterday Dicksplaash posted an article which included parts of an interview with Derrick Walker, who says canopies are not the answer. His preferred solution being a form of a windshield. I find myself agreeing with him. There are risks and challenges with canopies on single seaters, some obvious ones that are known and others that are not because barely any R&D has been done. Canopies work in sportscar racing because the cars are inherently wider and doors / exit hatches are a simple to install and use. Single seaters don't have that luxury.

There's no guarantee that a canopy or windscreen system would have saved Dan Wheldon or Jules Bianchi, because the circumstances and severity of those accidents were extreme. A system would have deflected the debris away from Justin though.

What is needed is a research program into potential solutions, not knee jerk reactions.

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BTCC Pick Em's Champion 2010
Formula Fun Cup Champion 2013
http://www.the-fastlane.co.uk

^^ Same thing that happens when a WEC or Stock Car ends up upside down and on fire, you put the fire out and drag them out (answering Jeff).

TBH I can see both sides, it's not a traditionalist thing Gaara, Motorsport is dangerous and quiet often it's that danger that draws people to it, the more you try to regulate danger out of something, the more it has a funny habit of creeping up behind you and shouting boo in an unexpected way, so for instance Indycar knee jerks a reaction, mandates some form of cockpit canopy, a few years down then line all is swingingly going well when someone get's trapped upside down under one and burns to death because their emergency release doesn't work (damaged in the crash), so what are you going to do then? By the present logic, they should be banned immediately because they are dangerous!

DeltaWings not that much wider then an open wheeler is it?

Has anyone thought of how many open wheel formula are out there worldwide? 20, 25, 30+ counting all the country and region specific ones? Are we going to update all of them or just focus on protecting the top tier pro's? Surtee's wasn't in an F1 car when the wheel hit him. If we're going to protect the pro's then we need to protect the amateurs and up and coming too. Aren't they actually in more danger due to the lower driver skills and high possibility of accidents?

Personally I think the canopies would look pretty cool. The possibilities of what could be done with them, not just from a safety standpoint, are pretty neat. I'm all for doing something. Be it a roll cage built into the tub, canopy, something.

Its useless to speculate though on what might have saved this driver or that. The fact remains that we cannot change the past. But it's long since time that open-wheel racing of all forms stops blundering into the same mistakes of the past instead of learning from them. Talk is cheap, action is what is needed. We've read long enough about committees and research boards and waiting for their findings only to have nothing done with them. Get off your asses open wheel and take a lesson from the tin tops. They made it a priority to make sure their drivers survived no matter how awful the crash. Time to do the same.

The canopy has only one pro, protecting the driver, which is important, but there's many unsolved issues with it and some known cons, mainly the other safety issues that it generates. Rain events would be cancelled without wipers and air condition systems as canopies would get foggy due humidity and blurred with rain water on the screen.

Motorsports is dangerous. It's dangerous because of the speed and forces that are generated in accidents. Soccer is safer, pool is even safer as they're not fast sports. Ski jumping is dangerous as there's a man flying fast in the air with skis in his feet.

I'm not saying they shouldn't try to find solutions, but I think it's difficult if you want to have open wheeled open cockpit formula.

If someone suggests closing the top or banning the formula, I raise a question of what we should do with motorcycle racing then? There the drivers are completely exposed and there's been many serious accidents when a fellow racer's bike has hit the driver. Clearly that form of racing is dangerous too, but no one suggest of banning it completely after every Isle of Man TT. No one is forced to race open cockpit cars nor bikes and people don't have to watch them if they don't accept that these concepts themselves include a safety hazard. Don't force ski jumpers to do 20 meter jumps in the name of safety when most of the fans want to see them go to 100 - 200 meters.

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"Indy doesn't give you a second chance. You have to earn it."

That's a good point. A lot of people seem to feel like safety changes in racing are all about removing danger. That's not correct. It's about mitigating danger and having an acceptable level of risk. Racing is always going to be dangerous, no matter what you do. You have to figure out what level of danger is acceptable, and then how to get to that point.

But also remember fixing one problem could create others, it's the lesser of two evils, at the moment the statistics weigh heavily against canopies.

I agree with NVirkkula.
No one has right to tell people to stop doing sports that involve risks. If some people want to do rock climbing without safety equipment, fine. If some people want to race vintage racing cars, fine. If some people want to drive Manx Grand Prix, fine.
All these people know the risks involved, but they accept them.

FIA obviously has an authority to decide what is accepted and what is not. However, they can't do anything if there is another racing series that want to use open-cockpits, want to use 60's design or want to race at public roads. Whether this kind of series becomes popular is another matter. The point is that while changing the nature of the sports there are always drivers and fans who lose interest and become interested in more extreme type of alternatives. Heck, in 2100 the most popular motorsport series can be very dangerous. Or then it will be a bunch of robot cars that drive 50mph at foam rubber track in Saudi Arabia.

More different types of series the merrier.

I think a full canopy would do much more harm in the long run, especially on oval tracks. Personally I think if we had full canopys during Indy this year, the outcome might have been different with Hinchcliffe as it would have most likely jammed the cockpit shut and would have taken longer to get him out of the car to get him to the hospital (as he was loosing blood very quickly). I think it could have helped in the situations of Di Matta, Massa and De Vilota but I don't think it would have helped much in Wheldon's case. However the NHRA has gotten it to work with the top fuel cars.

A half canopy/large windscreen might work better than a full canopy but we go back to the situation of having the drivers head exposed which wouldn't have helped in Justin's case (considering the piece went downward and not front to back).

A frontal roll hoop was one that my dad talked about with me yesterday, but again would be the same issues as a half canopy or large windscreen.

A NHRA top fuel style cage would work the best in my opinion if it was paired with a half canopy. While it would be still exposing the driver and allowing the driver to get out quicker in the case of a crash (depending on leg injuries of course), the amount of defection would be like more like a full canopy. However I don't think this would have helped Wheldon's case as roll bars can only do so much. Even NASCAR has been fearing roof-first hits, we have been very lucky that it hasn't happened in a long time. But we were very close at Daytona in July. NASCAR hasn't done much other than make the roll cage bigger though on the Cup and Xfinity CoT's. Some local tracks have recently mandated anti-intrusion panels on the cars that use a fiberglass roof however, which I don't think they use in the CoT chassis.

In the end, there could be something else out there that hasn't been developed yet. The only way we truly know if it was to help if it was tested, tested again and then used in a race. It could fix 1 problem but create many others. We have had parts and pieces end up into close cockpit cars this year too. It's motorsport and anything can and will happen. All we can do is attempt to make things safer, and that should be the goal of every sanctioning body and parts supplier right now and always.

canopies could make the cars more aerodynamic right

imagine that polycarbonate bubble with some winglets, Adrian Newey would go nuts and costs could increase

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Motorsports trend for 2024: everything is a bad taste joke now

I just want to say that every open wheel series or kart has that risk that something like this happens.
And im sure all the young drivers accept that when starting an open wheel carrer. Everyone knows motorsport is dangerous.
And the drivers know and accept that they could die when they drive and open wheel car.
Im not blaming anyone im just saying, there is always that risk of something similar could happen

I don't know much about the practicalities of introducing canopies or any other protection, but Whiting seems convinced it will happen.

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/120489

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Dan Wheldon ¦ 1978-2011
Marco Simoncelli ¦ 1987-2011
Jules Bianchi ¦ 1989-2015
Justin Wilson ¦ 1978-2015

Yeah, I know he's mad and I don't care. I do not care. I did not care then. I do not care now. I'm here to race him.

Lucas Di Grassi also reckons they'll all be closed cockpits in future. I'm inclined to agree.

I'm opposed for many reasons.

The canopies can cause a lot more issues than they save (car on fire...car upside down, etc), you start a whole snowball effect of new problems when you introduce something like this that could end up causing more problems than the one they intend to save.
For example how strong do they have to be to deflect an entire wheel and axle assembly? But then how light do they have to be to not unbalance the front of the car and cause further accidents?
And if you think a canopy would've saved Dan Wheldon you're kidding yourself, it'd probably have been ripped off with the rest of the top half of the car.

Then there's the whole formula argument. Eventually the wheels will get covered and the cockpits will have a canopy and then what differentiates and Indycar from a Sports car? The length of the races?

We can learn from this accident, we can make the sport better without fundamentally eroding away what makes the sport worth watching in the first place.
I resent the implication that anyone against cockpit canopies is an old fashioned traditionalist like Dale Earnheart railing against the Hans device. That's just not fair.
What isn't right either is propose fundamental changes to a sport based on a knee jerk reaction. The powers that be are looking into it, they will propose the best solution based on a scientific analysis. Then we go from there.

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RIP Birmingham Wheels: here's some of the crash videos I recorded when it was there:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIaKIE ... 5t9d5PvoHA

Twitter:

http://www.twitter.com/paulhadsley

I fully agree! We don't need canopies, we need tethers for the nose cone and the back wheel guards. Now the nose cone and the wheel guards are light weight and fast to change at the pits. They need to be "locked" to the car. Make the tethers have their own quick-lock system, that probably doesn't have to be much more complicated than the lock that rock climbers and fire fighters use so the pitstops won't be that much longer. The parts would still do their work but wouldn't litter the track once there's a contact that makes them come off.

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"Indy doesn't give you a second chance. You have to earn it."

Canopies also have another problem, the greenhouse effect, anybody who's ever stood still in a greenhouse for more than five minutes will understand, last week ours hit 60C (140F for you Yanks) even with the door open and a fan blowing.

I've never bought the car upside down on fire argument. I can't remember the last time that actually happened, and most decent racing series would have extinguishers on the scene in a matter of seconds. The one exception I can think of in recent years was in Asia, where one of the drivers (Winslow?) pulled another driver out of their car before it went up in flames.

Debris hitting a driver might not be the most common kind of accident, but doing something about it could have prevented at least two deaths in recent years. I don't know if the answer is canopies, or a windscreen, or something else; but the attitude of 'racing is dangerous and these accidents aren't that common' makes me feel uncomfortable. We have some of the best engineering brains in the world, in motorsport. I'm sure they could come up with some good ideas that don't compromise safety.

Watching the GP3 race in the morning before the Indycar, we had an accident where a wheel bounced across the track and took out another car. It wouldn't have been far away from injuring the driver. More than ever, the cars are designed to break apart on impact and there is far more debris after an accident than there ever used to be (yes, it's mostly small and light, but that didn't stop Massa being seriously injured by a small piece). Look at Kubica's Montreal accident from onboard the Toro Rosso following. It's scary how much debris was raining down on the driver.

Actually, Räikkönen came away with what could have been fatal at the A1 ring.
Since Bianchi's crash, I feel danger seems to be hovering around the sport more for some reason.

I am no fan of the closed look, but if it has to for safety, we should do it.
Then again, you will see the danger will bite in some other way. For example the driver not having clear vision due to the canopy, as he moves away from his stricken car, just as a recovery vehicle gets to the scene etc.

Danger can never be excluded. But where reasonably possible, proactive measures need to be taken. That said, the danger seems to be around more lately for some reason,