Well, at least something came from it then.
I guess what I'm saying is that an airbag, while it could be engineered to perform properly in a racecar, is a heavy complicated piece of equipment, and I'm not sure it'd solve any problems that can't be solved in less complicated, lighter ways.
How the heck did we get on this topic anyway?
Or perhaps you're simply unobservant. :-)
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3) remain deployed long enough to absorb secondary impacts. This, I suspect, is the one that would be a killer on the race course. I'm envisioning one of those crashes where the car goes end over end several times shedding parts the whole way. The airbag might help on the _first_ bounce but how about the second, third, fourth, etc? And those are the ones where the driver needs all the help he can get.
And I remember looking at a wrecked Porsche in the garage at Brumos one time. It was _flat_ from the firewall (or whatever you call the partition between the trunk and the passenger compartment in a Porsche--with a front engine it would have been the firewall) forward. The salesman's comment was "That was a bad one. Peter (Gregg, who was the owner of the dealership and a well known racing driver then) sprained his thumb in that one." That was back in '69--my Dad and I were there looking at a used XK-E that I was hoping would be my first car and the salesman was trying to steer him to a new Porsche having despaired of selling him the 250GTO that they had on the lot--fortunately my Dad was smarter than I was and so I ended up with mongo Detroit sedan aka roadgoing battleship so I'm still alive. There have been vast improvements in the safety features of racing cars since.
Not only impractical, but of dubious utility. Race car drivers wear 5-point harnesses, full-face helmets, and neck restraints. What is the airbag going to protect them from? An airbag in a passenger car is intended to keep your head from impacting hard parts of the car, and to some extent from your chest hitting the steering wheel, but all that is already being prevented by the other safety measures in race cars. Race drivers pretty routinely survive crashes at speeds well over 100 MPH.
If everyone in a passenger car was belted in and wearing a helmet, there would be no need for airbags in them either.
Bill Ranck Blacksburg, Va.
That's pretty much what I've been saying but this fellow Upscale seems a bit miffed that his idea couldn't get off the ground. God bless him for thinking and even for thinking out of the box, or wierdly, since that's where all truly good idead really come from, but he sure does seem sensative if his ideas aren't embraced by one and all.
Ah-ha, it was just a matter of time before this question came up...
Yeahbut.... imagine how hard it would have been to get that first piece of as* back in your high school days...
Well, no. I've seen plenty of steering wheels bent by the chests of people who were fully seatbelted; an airbag would have been softer. One guy had the imprint of the chevy bowtie bruised into his chest, along with the seatbelt bruises. Also, side impact and/or curtain airbags protect against directional forces that the seatbelts just can't (unless we went to 5-point, which will never happen).
It's a system, to be used one with the other, not one instead of the other. Both together are drastically better than either alone.
lf airbags work so all fired well then why, with all new cars equipped with airbags, are so many states all of a sudden passing seat belt laws?
I was suggesting if regular passenger car passengers and drivers were using 5-point belts and helmets. I didn't specify the 5-point harness, but I meant it. And, yes, I know it's never going to happen. My point was that drivers in race cars already have protection which works well enough that airbags would not be terribly useful.
Bill Ranck Blacksburg, Va.
I think the OP meant that if everyone was belted in with a 5 point harness and a helmet there would be no need for an airbag. Not very fashionable so I don't expect the wimmin to be jumping on board with that idea. The devices they pass off as seatbelts/shoulder harnesses in private vehicles fall really short of what they should provide in terms of safety. Somewhere between a 5 point harness and the typical passenger car restraint system lies a much better idea. But then again, we'd have to deal with all those other issues like seats that offer no rigidity, doors that cave in to the center of the car, etc., etc., etc.
Yup - for the passenger car, that's very true.
John wrote:>lf airbags work so all fired well then why, with all new cars equipped with
Because, without the seat belt, you probably wouldn't be in the right place for the airbag to help you. Tom Work at your leisure!
But with the seat belt how much difference does the airbag really make?
Quite a bit. You can still hit the dashboard and/or the steering wheel with seatbelts on. It's not always you moving towards them, sometimes they move towards _you_. An airbag is softer than either of these objects.
No harder than it already was.
todd
No, I'm not miffed in anyway, it's just that sometimes I get caught up in the heat of the discussion. Obviously, I'm lacking a certain amount of knowledge as to why an air bag wouldn't have some value in a race car, but only because I'm a true believer that just because something hasn't been done properly yet, doesn't mean that it's impossible.
I was the driver in an accident once that should have resulted in my death, but I came away with a simple cut on my hand and that was it. When I show a picture of the smashed vehicle to people, some refuse to believe that I was in it during the crash. A seatbelt saved my life so I'm all for the advancement of most all types of safety products for cars. But as many here have told me, we're discussing racing vehicles, not family cars.
Maybe so, but I'd see like you coming from a mile off. :)
I meant only to point out the absurdity of his characterization of the contact between NASCAR racers as "a little rubbing". Anyone who had ever seen a NASCAR race, even once, would know that it's a *lot* more than that. Which adds a little ironic humor to his characterization of the rest of us as a bunch of armchair quarterbacks or whatever it was.
Hm. What does a car have to do with getting any?
I had no car through college. I never felt frustrated getting any.
The post I responded to was talking about high school. Your opportunities for location of amorous behavior in high school are more limited than in college.
todd
Not once did I claim to be knowledgeable in regards to Nascar racing. I guess that doesn't make me the arrogant asshole you appear to be.
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