[Purist]

Luke, I think I'll take an Alpine-Renault A442 or A443 over that thing.

Cars can still catch fire, so I would NOT want an air bottle in close proximity to the driver. And if a driver is truly incapacitated, even if they've just been knocked out temporarily, the rescue teams will take several minutes to winch an enclosed car back upright, to make sure they do NOT potentially injure the driver. Even if the car is upright, it's been common practice for decades to cut the roof off of a car to extract a driver who appears to be in need of assistance. So, an automatic device that would roll the car back over suddenly I am unabashedly opposed to. That is a job specifically for the rescue crews, to be performed in a very carefully controlled manner.

And yes, talking about putting a canopy as a safety device on a car that has nil structural integrity in the first place is REALLY putting the cart before the horse!

There's a video of Stirling Moss driving a 1959 Cooper Climax at Donington on YouTube, and he makes a very telling comment about the relative strength of cars of then and now. And taking into account that structural rigidity didn't start to improve markedly until the latter part of the 1970s, or early 1980s, the relative rigidity of F1 cars has increased by 40x or so in the last 30-35 years.

Back to the topic at hand, with all the belts and restraints, a driver is often relatively incapacitated if his car is upside down. He may hardly be able to move at all, and the way the human brain is wired, we become disoriented, at least to some extent, when held in a non-upright position. So he may be unable to properly manipulate a manual canopy release while upside down, and if there is concern of a back or neck injury in particular, you do NOT want an automatic release.

Besides, if a small enough object, with enough mass, and going fast enough encounters the canopy, it will punch a hole in it. I think the spring that hit Massa could well be such an object, even with a canopy in place. And you can't make the canopy too think ,or it impacts visibility by being less trnasparent, and may act as a lens/prism, distorting a driver's depth perception.

At the end of the day, I think the canopy adds FAR more complications than it's worth for the EXTREMELY FEW injuries it might minimize or eliminate.