INDIANAPOLIS 500 : Ride in an Unguided Missile : The Quest Is to Make a Skidding Indy Car as Safe as Possible

When a car loses traction and begins sliding through a corner at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway at 200 m.p.h., it becomes a missile. There isn’t a thing the driver can do to stop it.

“The first reaction is to stand on the brake as hard as you can and hang on the steering wheel, trying to steer away from the wall,” said Alan Mertens, design engineer for the Galmer cars driven by Danny Sullivan and Al Unser Jr. “It’s instinctive to most drivers, but it’s the worst thing they can do.

“The best thing is to get your foot off the brake, pull your legs back as much as possible, take your hands off the steering wheel and make yourself as small as possible. A driver must have great reflexes to do that. That’s where experience comes in.”

How a spinning car hits the wall can be a matter of luck--good and bad.

The cars of Rick Mears, Nelson Piquet, Gary Bettenhausen and Jovy Marcelo were among 14 that crashed during this month’s countdown to Sunday’s Indianapolis 500.

Mears’ car hit with its left front, then flipped, and he suffered a broken left foot and a sprained right wrist. The Mertens’ method helped.

“I pulled my legs up as much as I could and said to myself, ‘This is going to hurt a whole bunch,’ ” said Mears, defending Indy 500 champion.

Piquet came out of a spin and struck the wall head-on, the impact shattering his lower legs and feet.

Terry Trammell, the orthopedic surgeon who operated on Piquet, said, “It will be the better part of a year for him to recover, and to what extent he recovers we cannot tell at this time.”

Bettenhausen’s spin was a little more complete and his car slammed into the wall with the right rear--instead of the front--end. He suffered only bruises and a headache.

Marcelo’s accident seemed the least threatening of all, the car making a three-quarter spin and hitting at an angle at a relatively slow speed, less than 175 m.p.h. as compared to far above 200 for the others. Yet he was killed by the impact, an apparent victim of G forces. An examination of marks on the wall indicated that after the first hit, Marcelo’s car whipped around and hit a second time.

According to the coroner’s report, Marcelo died of “a blunt head injury,” and there was no indication that he had been hit by any part of his car.

It is precisely what happened to Marcelo--and it used to happen far more frequently--that caused designers to build cars that would break apart on impact, absorbing and dispersing the shock instead of transferring it to the driver’s body. Usually when an Indy car hits the wall hard, it gives the appearance that there is little hope for a driver, but in many cases the driver suffers only minimal injuries.

Since the adoption of military-type fuel cells, fire has been almost eliminated from Indy car racing wrecks. The last time an impact-induced fire occurred at Indianapolis was in 1975, when Tom Sneva’s car collided with Eldon Rasmussen’s and slammed into the second-turn wall. Sneva was burned on his face, hands and legs.

Since then, most injury accidents have involved lower body extremities--legs, feet and ankles.

“It is impossible to produce a car that is 100% safe,” said Mertens, who received the Louis Schwitzer Award this month for “excellence and innovation in race car design and development” for his engineering of the new Galles-Kraco Galmers. “The regulations, as they stand now, are quite good. Speeds such as we have today, in close proximity with concrete walls, create a likely environment for crashes.

“What design engineers are doing is attempting to minimize the effects of the impact. A major improvement recently is in use of composite materials that will absorb the shock, not once but twice, at impact.”

There are no regulations for use of materials, but whatever is used must pass stringent impact tests conducted for each car introduced into the Indy car program.

Kirk Russell, director of operations for the Indy car circuit, said that engineers must tread a fine line in designing nose cones to protect driver’s feet.

“It would be simple to make the nose so strong that the feet would not be hurt, but that could create a worse problem with internal injuries and perhaps fatalities from the load of G forces at impact,” he said.

In testing, sleds are used to accelerate a car loaded with fuel into a wall with instruments that record the loads at impact and tell if the energy is dissipated sufficiently.

Truesports, the only Indy car builder in America, tests its new models at the Transportation Research Center in Marysville, Ohio.

“We gave our Truesports car an added impact test at Long Beach,” said Steve Horne, co-owner of the Truesports team, alluding to the accident involving Scott Pruett before the Long Beach Grand Prix. “Scott hit the wall at approximately 160 m.p.h. at a 60-degree angle with a force of about nine G’s, and all he got was a scratch on the shin. He was back racing again in an hour.”

Two test facilities in England are used by makers of the Penske, Lola and Galmer cars.

The cars must accept two impacts during the tests, one of 10 meters per second and the second of eight meters per second.

“If the G loads on impact are too high, the cars must be redesigned and tested again,” Russell said. “Designers can use any material, such as carbon fiber or aluminum, or any combination they desire, as long as the end result passes the impact test.”

Dale Coyne, a former driver and now a car owner who is on the Indy car rules committee, says improvements in safety are being made almost from race to race.

“It seems like there are new and improved carbon fiber elements coming out every three months or so,” Coyne said. “We are getting much help from the aerospace industry, and as fast as they discover better materials and stronger weaves, we adapt them to our use.”

Most of the bodywork, including nose cones, is made of carbon fiber and honeycomb composites utilizing a variety of weaves and patterns, depending on load requirements. Each carbon fiber chassis takes about 21 days to manufacture.

“You compare this year’s crop of new cars with cars as recent as 1990 and you will find the new ones much stronger and much lighter,” Coyne said. “Lightness becomes important on impact because the lighter the car, the less mass there is to distribute.”

The foot box inside the nose cone is an area especially under examination.

One of Mertens’ innovations in the Galmer was to mount the pedals on a sliding bracket so that, in a head-on crash, the entire pedal assembly slides back with the pedals perpendicular to the floor. This minimizes the possibility of Achilles’ tendon damage to the driver.

Cockpits have been enlarged from a few years ago, when a driver lay almost on his back with his legs extended straight out in an envelope-like package.

“The cockpits have been designed with more room in the leg area,” said Coyne, who at 6-feet-1 and 200 pounds was one of the biggest drivers. “Drivers have more room to move their legs and feet, and there is more padding to absorb a hit.”

Driver John Andretti, who is 5-5 and slight of build, says it pays to be short.

“When I crashed at Pocono (in 1988), the throttle pedal smashed into the (cockpit), and the beam split the car right up between my legs,” he said. “I’m still sitting farther back than everybody else, because they have made the pedals longer.”

Coyne also said that equipment manufacturers are continually improving such items as helmets and seat harnesses.

Mertens, who worked on Formula One designs before joining Rick Galles on the Galmer program, says Indy cars could be further improved by adapting some of the Formula One regulations.

“The driver’s feet are the point that usually hits first in a crash, and the pedal position in Indy cars is farther forward than in Formula One,” he said. “It could help the situation if we extended the nose a bit longer.”

Eddie Cheever, a Formula One driver for 10 years before switching to Indy cars in 1990, says that track conditions account for a higher safety rate in Formula One, rather than design regulations.

“In Formula One, if you make a mistake in one of the 20 corners, you hit 50 yards of sand, then you go over four rows of catch fence and then eight rows of tires,” he said. “By the time you hit a wall, you’re slowed down.

“Here, you don’t even have enough time to think of anything before you hit the wall. This is a speed bowl.”

Several other suggestions have been made in the interest of safety, particularly aimed toward slowing the cars, but no one seems to have a definitive answer.

Among the ideas are making the tracks narrow, which would make passing more of a premium; reducing horsepower, which would make cars easier to drive and detract from driver skill; removing the wings, which would force drivers to lift off the accelerator in the turns; and narrowing the tires, which would decrease the immense downforce generated by the wings.

“Everyone talks about it, and we think about it all the time, but I don’t think there is an answer,” Indy car champion Michael Andretti said. “At least not at the moment. All we can do is adapt to the conditions as they are.

“Like everything else, they are continually changing. Today, when we warm up at 190 (m.p.h.) it feels like we’re crawling. Ten years ago, 190 felt like we were flying. I don’t know what’s ahead. All I know for sure is that the track is shrinking, and it’s still 2 1/2 miles around.”

That was pretty much what was said in 1962 when Parnelli Jones startled Indy 500 old-timers by driving laps at 150 m.p.h. on a track that was built for speeds of no more than 75 when the first 500 was held in 1911.

The Drive for Safety

Until Jovy Marcelo of the Philippines was killed Friday during practice for Sunday’s Indianapolis 500, there had not been a death at the Speedway in 10 years. Indy cars are now built around a rigid cockpit, or tub, and offer protection that enables drivers to survive crashes that in previous eras would have been fatal. Wings: The wings serve the aerodynamic function of keeping tires on the track while driving and also help absorb impact in crashes. Tub: The cockpit is usually made of carbon fibers, Kevlar and aluminum honeycomb and is designed to remain intact, protecting the driver, while other parts of the car help absorb the impact. Roll bar: Often made of titanium or equally rigid material, it protects the driver’s head when the car flips. Padding behind the driver’s head helps reduce force of impact. Fuel cells: Fire was at one time one of the driver’s greatest fears. Now, because the fuel is stored in flexible cells that resist puncture, fire is no longer the threat it used to be. The cells are located behind the driver’s seat and in front of the engine. Wheels: The wheel assembly is designed so that tires and wheels will collapse against the tub on impact, then fly off, so drivers are rarely hit by their own wheels. The wheels absorb considerable impact. Nose: Inside the nose, there is a honeycomb panel designed to protect the driver’s feet and legs, probably the most vulnerable parts of the body, particularly in a head-on crash. Leg injuries are still among the most common in Indy car front-end crashes and among the most difficult to eliminate. Rick Mears, who crashed May 6 at Indy, drew his feet up under the dash during the crash. He suffered a broken bone in his left foot, but avoided crippling leg injuries that he might have otherwise received.