Motorsports are dangerous
Published Mon, Jan 19 2009 10:46 AM
All of them.
One of my favorite things to do is race cars. The thrill of acceleration. The noise. The tire smoke. That wonderful smell of racing gasoline, methanol, or nitromethane (OK, that last one burns and doesn't really smell all that great, but come on, it's raw power). Running flat out with a high-horsepower motor making your tires pound the pavement while your foot tries to push the accelerator through the floor. These are a few of my favorite things.
I don't race much myself right now. It's an expensive sport. It can also be time consuming, taking up your entire weekend schedule during racing season. So when I'm not actually racing, I still like to watch. Mostly I watch drag racing, because that the type of racing I do, but I also watch Formula 1, Indy Cars, SCCA, and other forms of road racing, as well as NASCAR and dirt track racing. Most of the racing I watch is on television — tame and safe. Watching NASCAR on television is usually pretty boring though. Forty-some-odd cars running around in circles just doesn't quite cut it on television, besides, there's that list of my favorite things and you can't smell racing fuel through the television yet.
Watching racing in person, at the track is the next best thing to being in the car though. A lot of people like to watch the mayhem when cars crash. In Mexico for example, spectators even sabotage the “track” to cause accidents at the Baja 500! Still for most people the raw power of racecars and the noise are enough to get the blood racing and the pulse pounding at live motorsports events.
The goal of most motorsports is to go from point A to point B in the least amount of time possible, preferably in less time than your opponents. There are generally two ways to ensure that this happens, both related to Newton's third law of motion. You can either make your vehicle lighter so that less force is required to accelerate it, or you can make your engine more powerful so that it can accelerate more mass. A third option, the one usually taken, is to do both.
There are limits though. You can only remove so much mass from the frame and body of a racecar before it becomes unsafe. Most sanctioning bodies have strict rules that govern the thickness and material composition of the tubing that goes into the frame of a racecar, as well as that govern the design of that frame. These frames are designed to provide a rigid safety cage around the driver that won't collapse in the event of a catastrophic accident. The rest of the car is designed to break up, fold up or otherwise absorb the energy of the vehicle during a crash.
On the other side, many sanctioning bodies limit the power that your engine can make. This is done in part to reduce costs so that more people can afford to race, and to make classes more uniform so that competition is tighter. An example of this is restrictor plate racing in NASCAR. Another reason why sanctioning bodies put strict limitations on how you can build your engine is safety. Really high horsepower internal combustion engines can appear to be fragile things. I say appear to be because they're really producing prodigious amounts of power. A top fuel engine typical of the dragsters and funny cars in NHRA competition can be producing over 8,000 horsepower from a 550 cubic inch block of steel and aluminum! That's 1,000 horsepower per cylinder!
Pumping huge amounts of power through the parts of a racecars drivetrain puts a tremendous strain on the parts that drivetrain is made up of. Consider the typical fastener used to hold parts together — the bolt. There are lots of ways that bolts can be used to fasten parts together. Often they are arranged to take advantage of the thickness of the bolt, rather than the relatively tiny amount of metal in the threads, but it's not always possible to do this. For example, to hold the cylinder heads onto the engine block, high grade bolts are used, but the only thing that's actually holding the cylinder heads on is that tiny amount of metal in the threads. If the threads shear off under the force of 1,000 horsepower per cylinder, the head's going to come loose, with catastrophic consequences.
When you consider how much power a racing motor produces it's really amazing that a racecar can even be held together.
When you attend a live motorsports event, there are almost always warnings posted clearly to let you know that you attend at your own risk. Drivers and crew have to sign a waiver of liability and acknowledge that the event they are participating in might result in their death. If you go to one of the NHRA's national events, the back of your ticket warns you that even spectators assume the risk of death or serious injury. I've watched engine explosions that threw large parts into the crowd at more than one drag race. I've watched crashes that literally tore the racecars involved to bits, spewing parts everywhere, including into the stands.
I've never seen such warnings at Monster Jam. Yesterday was my son's fifteenth birthday. He's gone to the drag races with me since he was old enough to walk, but he's never been to watch Monster Jam. So we went yesterday.
A Monster Jam show is more than just Monster Truck racing. There's also barrel racing, a demolition derby, and in Tacoma they also have a “rollover contest.” The big attraction though is the big trucks. Watching a truck drive right over a station wagon is pretty cool. The weight of the truck literally crushes the station wagon. When the truck hits the car at speed, the front wheels are lifted high into the air only to come crashing down a second or so later. Sometimes the entire truck gets airborne.
A Monster Truck is a heavy thing. Their motors generally have to produce a huge amount of horsepower to accelerate them quickly in a short space. After all, these events are often held indoors in a stadium like the Tacoma Dome. During freestyle competition sometimes these trucks take off from twenty or thirty yards away from a ramp and end up flying through the air with their wheels twenty or thirty feet above the ground! When they come down, there's a tremendous impact. Occasionally parts break. Large suspension parts get bent or even sheared in two. Wheels come off the trucks. Bolts snap and the suspension collapses. It's all a part of the show, usually.
Every now and then though something horrible happens. Motorsports are, after all, quite dangerous. On Friday, one of the big trucks was performing and parts of the drivetrain broke and flew into the stands, injuring one man and killing a six year old boy. The picture below is from a Seattle Times article about the investigation into the incident.
It's a tragedy when this sort of thing happens. Especially so when it happens to a child. There are no words I know how to use to express how badly I feel for that boy's family, and for the driver of the truck that broke apart and killed him.
Investigators were examining pieces of the drive train from an oversized truck Sunday to learn why parts tore off the truck and struck and killed a 6-year-old boy and injured another spectator at a monster truck show.
Witnesses described the boy, Sebastian Hizey, being struck in the head by a Frisbee-sized chunk of metal that tore off a truck doing doughnuts during the Monster Jam show Friday night in the Tacoma Dome.
Police gathered loose parts of the drive train and the drive train loop, a special monster truck device that is supposed to hold the drive train on the vehicle, Bill Easterling, senior operations director for Feld Motor Sports of Aurora, Ill., told The Associated Press on Sunday.
He said he could give no further details or description of the loose parts, including where they were found. “I've never seen the loop or the drive shaft parts come off like this,” said Easterling, whose company is the promoter of the show.
It may be that the accident was caused when they cleared the track after this truck failed to start.
The boy's father, Jessie Hizey of Puyallup, told The News Tribune of Tacoma, a metal ring weighing 7 to 12 pounds sheared off part his son's skull. They and other relatives were sitting in grandstands 20 to 25 feet above the arena floor.
Jessie Hizey said the red and silver truck, Natural High, at first failed to start and was hauled away by forklift. It returned to the show, and the metal ring flew from under the truck as it was spinning in tight circles in the mud.
“You go out for a night of fun, and you lose your son,” Hizey said in a whisper, his face twisted in grief.
Motorsports are a lot of fun, but they always carry a serious risk. This should be a sobering reminder to us all. When you go to the track, you take your life into your own hands. If it's that dangerous at the track maybe this reminder will convince a few people that it's even more dangerous on the streets. They do everything they can at the track to ensure driver and spectator safety. The same can't be said for street racing.
Be safe out there. OK?
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Stanford Matthews responded with:
 | Once upon a time in the city of beer my uncle took me to my first racing event. We sat in the grandstand near where the seats met the roof. I remember waiting for my hearing to return to normal after the race. But it was a great deal of fun.
I haven't personally visited a track in a long time. Last one was dog racing. Before that horse racing. The last car race was helping friends compete in official drag racing at the local track.
A friend of mine works for a Nascar team. But I have mostly been drawn to aviation for years. But I frequent car shows featuring classics.
To me it is Americana. But things have changed dramatically these last few years. Nascar is hurting for sponsor money now. Detroit has had better years. I don't like witnessing these changes. Thought I would be gone before they happened. |
David responded with:
 | *heh* The only "motorsports" I engage in are "races" other drivers apparently think they're in. A "win" for me is to pass speeding drivers before I get to my destination by NOT exceeding the speed limit or driving unsafely, but by simply outdriving the idiots who think that in traffice, they can speed (and make unsafe lane changes, etc.) and get to their destination appreciably quicker than by simply reading the road and driving well.
I "win" an awful lot of these "races"--not unsurprisingly. Sometimes, about the third time I pass a speed idiot, they even get the point and slot in behind me. When they start tailgaiting, though, I just ease off a bit until they feel compelled to pass... and then, like as not, I'll end up passing them again later as they shove themselves into a traffic trap of one kind or another.
But driving around in circles is just not for me, though perfectly fine for others, I know--and I doubt my kinds of driving skills would suit well on a race track. |
Angel responded with:
 | ah sad but youre right..the thrill is incomparable! |
Layla responded with:
 | You are right about the dangers Perri, but people do not care. It is about the thrill for them and it is as addictive as a drug. Sad. |