Quote:
Originally Posted by Flyin Ryan
My dad's going to die laughing when he hears this. He used to tell me how a certain group of Americans back in the '70s used to put stiff springs off the ends of their cars so their car wouldn't hit the curbs. For one possible solution we're now going to have racecars use the same concept. 
Jenson Button-Lewis Hamilton incident this past weekend. Button moved over either to block or because he didn't know Hamilton was there and created the incident. That's tire to tire. Another example is watch the Marco Andretti in-car camera from his crash at Indy one year where Dan Wheldon turned him over on the backstretch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbArt...eature=related And unlike an oval, these cars when they're at Le Mans won't have spotters telling them "clear", "inside", etc., and the DeltaWing driver in this case has no frontal reference point for the size of his rear wheelbase when moving across the track. |
They were called "curb feelers" and I would say they were a '60's thing, although there were still cars that had them in the '70's. They were mostly used by old people who didn't know where their car ended. They worked by making a noise when the car got close to the curb, so the driver would know not to drive any closer and scratch those nice chrome hubcaps. If race drivers are truly as inept as you say they are, yes, it will be necessary to have a version of curb feelers for race drivers. I think they can adjust for it. Sportscar drivers can't see the actual wheel but they can still get close to the apex by creating a mental plumb bob from the fender to the tire. They can also create a mental yardstick from the chassis to where a front tire would be.
I would say a driver would knock off a rear corner before he hit another car in the sort of incidents you describe, but if you had a bunch of these racing together, you would have a lot less problems because there wouldn't be a lot of front wings to knock off. That would have been a good move for the Indy bunch, because the owners could all have zeroed-out their front wing budget. Indy's loss is our gain.
And as bjohnsonsmith points out, this design eliminates the potential of the classic open wheel interlocked wheels accidents. If anything, this design significantly reduces accidents relative to the classic approach. Fortunately ACO is open to things that don't comply with the limitations of the current rules.