“Motorsport Out Of Step On Concussion” - AA

[GTRMagic]

From issue #1900 of Auto Action this week

Hopefully the protocols are in place for next season.

[Tel 911S]

I can,t get those pages to come as to be readable .
But I think they are about the cars impacting into something and causing injury to the drivers .
This is something that came up a long time ago with the death of Dale Earnhardt in Nascar racing .A very extensive study into his accident , [ which led to HANS devices being made compulsory ,] showed that he hit the wall at just 42 MPH . Because the cars were a massive space frame chassis , there was very little of the impact absorbed by the car and the resultant forces were mostly put onto the driver which killed him .
Modern ENCAP testing for road vehicles makes them a lot safer in absorbing impacts , but if you put huge roll cages in and brace the whole thing right through the car , it passes a lot more onto the driver .

[GTRMagic]

Originally Posted by The Article Above, Page 6, AA #1900

MOTORSPORT OUT OF STEP ON CONCUSSION

TWO CONCUSSIONS IN ONE SUPERCARS RACE WEEKEND HAVE RAISED THE SPECTRE OF CONCUSSION MANAGEMENT IN SUPERCARS AND THE BROADER MOTORSPORT WORLD IN AUSTRALIA. ANDREW CLARKE INVESTIGATES ...

AUSTRALIAN MOTORSPORT is out of step with the broader sporting community when it comes to concussion management according to one of the world's leading sports medicine doctors, Doctor Peter Larkins.

Doc Larkins, as he is more broadly known, says crashes with big G forces carry an extraordinary risk of concussion, but that research in the United States into its football code showed concussion can occur with impacts as little at 5G.

Concussion is also known as mild traumatic brain injury (mild TBI) and it has been on the FIA radar for the best part of a decade, even being a central point of discussion at an FIA medical summit in 2017, but it's treatment and diagnosis doesn't seem to have evolved much in motorsport since then.

Sergio Perez and Fernando Alonso have both been forced to miss races during their
F1 careers as a result of being diagnosed with mild TBI.
Alonso's was perhaps the most famous after a pre-season crash in 2015. Following the 215km/h crash, Alonso woke up thinking he was a 15-year-old karter, despite already being a two-time world champion. On doctors' recommendation, his missed the first race of the season, with concerns that a second major impact before settling the injury could be fatal.

In Formula 1, crash sensors on the car and inside the earpiece of the drivers indicate if a crash has exceeded a pre-set amount, believed to be 25G, which triggers concussion testing protocols.

The Australian Sports Commission has guidelines for dealing with professional and amateur sport, which have different protocols based on access to dedicated and expert medical care. Under the Commission's Concussion in Australian Sport document, it recommends 14 days free of concussion symptoms before returning to 'contact and high-risk' activities, and a return to competition not before 21 days post-concussion AND having remained symptom-free for at least 14 days.

Motorsport Australia in its recently updated (October 2024) Medica/ Standards: Fitness to Compete document deals with head injuries in section 4.6 but will soon issue guidelines for 2025.

'Individuals with concussion, traumatic brain injury, or fracture of the skull without associated intracranial injuries are UNFIT to compete until a satisfactory report, together with investigation results (X-rays, EEG, MRI and/or CT scan if indicated), is received and approved by Motorsport Australia.

'Competitors with concussion should undergo a graduated 'Return to Sport' process and shall be declared unfit while remaining symptomatic. It is likely that individuals with concussion will remain UNFIT for seven days minimum while they progress through these 'Return to Sport' procedures.

The graduated return to sport process has several steps that need to be completed before a driver is approved to race again, including a set number of days symptom-free.

But the problem is the assessment of concussion, and that is where Larkins feels the motorsport community is lacking. His radar was triggered when talking about crashes at Bathurst exceeding 50G, and Richie Stanaway and Jaxon Evans stepping aside because of concussion following Turn 8 crashes in Adelaide.

He feels motorsport needs to get a little more mature about how it handles concussion.

Originally Posted by The Article Above, Page 7, AA #1900

"I think what's happened in motor racing is there's so many other spectacular crashes that there's a lot of other injuries that get attention," he says. "Obviously in Supercars and any other car racing, you get enormous g-forces, plus you get a lot of head shake and head jarring.

"The focus is always on whether they get a chest injury from the seatbelt or whether they break a collarbone or something.

But with world sport going the way it's gone with the emphasis on head injury and concussion, it's no surprise that now they're starting to realise that they may be missing a few of those.

*We talk about the skull as a being like a solid container, and you've got the brain like a bowl of jelly sitting in a liquid inside the solid frame.

"If you shake that frame, the skull, then the jelly is going to bounce around inside.
And that's what happens when you spin your head. You don't even have to have direct contact against it to cause a concussion."

Larkins was shocked to hear that Richie Stanaway was ruled out of the Saturday race in Adelaide with concussion, but wasn't automatically ruled out of the Sunday race with statements indicating Stanaway would be re-assessed.

Motorsport Australia says that while Grove Racing may have been hopeful that Stanaway would be cleared to race, that it would likely have blocked his return to the driver's seat based on its protocols after a diagnosed concussion.

In the AFL, where Larkins spends most of his time, a mandatory 12-day break from competition would be enforced. He feels that it is a lack of awareness rather than a lack of care that lives at the heart of the issue within the motorsport community.
"I think that the emphasis is on what happens with the brain and concussion, and how you lose spatial awareness, and you certainly lose balance.

"There's recognition that while the person may be talking sensibly, and can walk in a straight line, their ability to process information quickly, and particularly when it comes to spatial awareness in terms of around them, and the ability to react to hand-eye coordination, has been shown to be slowed down for literally up to two or three weeks on average.

"And that's only on average.

"So now you see these exclusion periods, which are based on returning to normal on those testing protocols which are standard across international sports but not in motorsport."

Part of the issue for motorsport is that it remains relatively isolated from the rest of the sporting world when it comes to the medical side of the sport, which Larkins feels may be populated more by doctors as motorsport fans rather than sports medicine concussion experts as in the major football codes, horse racing and other high impact sports.

"They should be in tune with current expectations, and current protocols that exist for people that have any form of head shake or head injury.

"You don't have to be concussed to have concussion symptoms. People think concussion is getting kicked in the head or knocked in the head, or even losing consciousness, which is an extreme version of concussion. But most concussions don't have any loss of consciousness, they simply have a head spin. They might get a headache.

"You can resolve pretty quickly in the visible symptoms, things like being unsteady on your feet or going dizzy. They're visible, but the internal processing is where we're learning, and it's a steep learning curve.

"I'm not saying we have all the answers but certainly a protocol where the professional drivers should be pre-season tested, so you get a baseline, is a start.

"You test the cars, don't you? You know the power output, you know your grip, you know your tyre preference, you know your gear ratios, and all that sort of stuff that teams spend millions of dollars on.

"What I'm saying is the actual person who is driving the car should be tested for these brain injury signs so you've got a baseline, which is what happens in other sports. Then, in the event of a suspected concussion or an incident of a certain type - it doesn't have to even be a nasty one - you can then very, very quickly test them, and show that they're either OK, or they're not.

"Things like, hand-eye coordination, eye movements and eye tracking. Think in motor racing how critical that is; it's critical enough in footy when you've got to know where the ball is, and you've got to know where your opponent is, but when you're making reactions at 280km/h, I think that's a slightly different sort of threat if you get it wrong." Larkins accepts that for amateur levels of the sport, baseline testing is hard, but at a professional level he feels it is a minimum standard.

The Sports Concussion Assessment Tool, which is now in its sixth revision -
SCATE - only works on certain aspects of a concussion, but without a baseline it is simply ‘the best of a poor group of tests that you can do on the sidelines, and in the first 24 hours'

"When I say poor, it is because it is not infallible. There's still an art to when you're working with an athlete to know their personality, and there's other aspects of medical assessment that aren't SCAT related

"It's a concussion assessment tool - it's not a concussion prevention tool. For baseline tests you're talking about other things like balance testing, and neuropsychological testing is where it's hand-eye coordination, and memory, and reaction time. That's what the pre-season testing that the leading sports people do in the in the non-racing world.

"I'm talking about what is contemporary best practice.

"Clearly it should be made available given the sponsorship and the media coverage.
I would advocate a bit of a wake-up call to realise that there's improvements in the medical care program. And one of the improvements would be to recognise that head injury, and concussion, and sub-concussion is real when you're having those high-speed collisions with the neck and the head getting thrown around with those g-forces.

"Any system only works well if the athlete involved is also honest with reporting any lingering symptoms to the medical team after a head incident. I'm not sure it has been on their radar enough to raise the awareness of what the medical consequences might be.

"It's interesting that when we had the big world concussion meeting in Amsterdam in 2022, there was a really interesting report from American football where they had sensors in the helmets looking at their injuries over two years, and they showed that concussion can occur with as an impact as low as 5G, and there were some that were 90G."

He said the nature of concussion doesn't mean that an impact of a certain reading will cause a concussion, but big g-forces in a crash should be the first sign that something might be amiss.

The next step though was how to handle a concussion once it has been diagnosed.

*In all the sports that have adopted a sensible and responsible concussion protocol, it is basically about a 12-day minimum turn around to go through the testing and return to practice, return to training, return to pre-competition exertion, and then competition.

"Those four stages take more than seven days. Hence the compulsory week off, but for some people it may three of four weeks off. But generally, everyone's missing the following week because of the protocol that's in place.

"How that would apply exactly to training in motorsport I don't know, that requires more thought. But there's a standard where you go back to low-level training, slightly higher training, training with a bit of competition." Big crashes like those experienced by Dave Reynolds and Will Davison at Bathurst could have ruled them out of the race if the right concussion testing protocols were in place.

Losing stars from big events has often caused discussion among naive fans of sport, but the evidence of the long-term effects of ignored concussions in other sports means motorsport - particularly Supercars - needs to get in step with the rest of the sporting world.

Motorsport Australia says its 2025 guidelines will be released in early December.

Reproduced in it’s entirety..

[Tel 911S]

Thanks for putting that up so I could read it .
It is as I thought , that collision impacts put high G force effects onto the drivers .
With Dale Earnhardt it caused a Basilar skull fracture .

Road cars now have ENCAP ratings , which are based upon how a car crumples up and therefore reduces the G force put onto the driver .
But with competition cars , the more they are braced up to make them stronger , the more force is then put onto the driver .So it does need a roll cage for the passenger compartment , but not to much other work done .
So the ideal balance will probably be different for each car, so that the front ,[ or rear ,] will crumple up and reduce impact effect .
But that will need a lot of working out to get it right .

[V8 Fireworks]

Originally Posted by Tel 911S

Modern ENCAP testing for road vehicles makes them a lot safer in absorbing impacts , but if you put huge roll cages in and brace the whole thing right through the car , it passes a lot more onto the driver .

Surely this was all considered in Gen 3 design and there was good reason to dismiss the idea of using Brazilian Stock Car style front, side and rear foam/honeycomb impact structures?

Brazilian Stock Car chassis with front, side and rear crash structures:


The Brazilian chassis may still have problems with front and rear offset crashes that bypass the front or rear crash boxes.

Offset crash performance has obviously been a big area of development in road cars over the last 10 years or so, with offset crashes being introduced into crash testing requirements.

Originally Posted by Tel 911S

But with competition cars , the more they are braced up to make them stronger , the more force is then put onto the driver

Presumably the wise engineers at PACE/888 had good reason to eliminate the conventional front, crumpling chassis rails of the Group 3A through COTF car?

The rear chassis rails and their ability to crumple were already eliminated when Project Blueprint switched to COTF. Computer simulation already allows for estimating the way the tubular rear end will crumple, after all -- albeit (allegedly) Gen 3 was not physically crash tested unlike COTF.

[Teletubby]

Take a look at this: https://rescueracer.org/

Research undertaken in conjunction with the BTCC, part funded by TOCA and part funded by the FIA, links to various abstracts are there too.

[Tel 911S]

All of the cars I have built / prepared for competition were for rallying , therefore based on production road cars . From the 1960s onwards production cars has crush zones built in , so I realised that some thought had to go into how much strengthening was put into them .

Have not done much reading up on how latest regulations for safety how progressed for race cars , but remember seeing some in the past which looked much too rigid and were likely to pass a lot more impact forces on to the driver .
So perhaps some progress has been made there , and possible some more safety design factors are needed .


Edit , just seen above link , so will read up on that .

[Langers]

Originally Posted by V8 Fireworks

Surely this was all considered in Gen 3 design and there was good reason to dismiss the idea of using Brazilian Stock Car style front, side and rear foam/honeycomb impact structures?

Brazilian Stock Car chassis with front, side and rear crash structures:


The Brazilian chassis may still have problems with front and rear offset crashes that bypass the front or rear crash boxes.

Offset crash performance has obviously been a big area of development in road cars over the last 10 years or so, with offset crashes being introduced into crash testing requirements.




Presumably the wise engineers at PACE/888 had good reason to eliminate the conventional front, crumpling chassis rails of the Group 3A through COTF car?

The rear chassis rails and their ability to crumple were already eliminated when Project Blueprint switched to COTF. Computer simulation already allows for estimating the way the tubular rear end will crumple, after all -- albeit (allegedly) Gen 3 was not physically crash tested unlike COTF.

Drivers doors in Supercars do have energy absorbing foam, as do top spec rally cars.

The Gen 3 chassis rails also do have collapsible sections front and rear.

Entirely different set of design specs to a road car. Need to design a Supercar to handle impact into a wall on Conrod at 290km/h, crumple enough to absorb some energy, but not so much that the driver gets squished. It's an engineering challenge, for sure.

[Langers]

Re: concussion debate, motorsport is different to ball sports as you you're taking out the ONLY 'player', so the impact on the team is higher than in ball sports where you just substitute in someone else.

Could make for an interesting scenario with teams ensuring they have a stand-by driver on call at each race weekend. One who has actually brought their race gear with them...

[GTRMagic]

Motorsport Australia Concussion Protocols

It begs the question as to given the infrequency of heavy g-load crashes, whether all pilots should be subject to concussion protocols after any incident.

And if you followed the driver testing line along a logical pathway, any car subject to a high g-level incident according to the same metrics, might do best to be excluded and only achieve inclusion upon full V8Supercar inspection of datum point compliance, and safety of the structure of all homologated superstructures within the vehicle.

Maybe some of these seriously hurt cars SHOULD be scratched.. along with their pilots..