... First off, those belts do not seem to have been snugged down sufficiently.
I don't know about this test individually, but my understanding is that Delphi staff do the testing and I would assume that they understand the importance of tight belts.
Second, most of us do not race on a flat metal plate for a seat lacking any lateral support, such as what was tested. We racing on racing seats which do provide some lateral support. Some better than others.
You are onto something VERY important here, Greg. This is one major shortcoming of the SFI test. This is supposition on my part but, as someone who gathers data for a living, if I were designing the 38.1 protocol and knew that evidence suggested that I could expect strong interaction effects between seats, harnesses, and H&N systems, I might leave the seat out of the equation for the sake of "fairness." Test protocols like this require - first and foremost - repeatability. (This is why I strongly doubt that harnesses were looser in either test.) If Delphi used, say a RECARO SPG Racer like mine, it would be possible for people to accuse the test of being biased against a particular H&N system, the design of which for whatever reason doesn't jive with that seat.
Third, even though the belts slipped on the Hans, look very closely at the video and compare the total amount of head movement and neck travel of the Hans user to the non-Hans user. The Hans user still had less head and neck travel, inspite of not being used correctly i.e. the belts too loose and slipping out.[/quote]
Again, I don't know the numbers involved in these specific tests but remember that it isn't MOTION that kills you. What we really care about is the reduction of the loads imposed on the connection between noggin and neck.
... if you don't use the safety equipment properly i.e. snug your belts down properly, proper mounting angle (which BTW is what contributed to Earnharts death), decent racing seat with some lateral support, then the Hans might not be as effective as another device.
Abso-damn-lootly. The basis of our complaints with SFI 38.1 is that it tests H&N systems to a minimum standard, completely out of context of the real world of real racers, in real race cars, hitting real stuff, real hard. This is what
headrestraint.org is responding to. Instead of a standard, the
sole purpose of which is to indemnify sanctioning bodies and manufacturers, we should have a way of reporting head-load force reductions in a variety of conditions, in a variety of crashes.
I should be able to ask a H&N manufacturer how well their system works with MY seat, in MY type of car - and they should have some motivation to find out, so they can provide me and other safety consumers with that information. As it is, SFI requirements by sanctioning bodies pose a huge DISINCENITVE to testing any protocol besides 38.1
Why, for example, would any manufacturer in the current environment want to test a broadside crash into a tree (all but certainly the most fatal situation for rallyists), when they have nothing to gain by doing so? Why don't Rally America and NASA Rally demand this kind of testing? Because the manufacturers and SFI have given them an easy out with 38.1. Who suffers? Racing consumers, who get a dumbed-down "yes/no" test and a list of "approved" devices - tested against a protocol that SFI itself tells us (at its lawyers' prompting, no doubt) shouldn't be used to compare the performance of systems.
K
