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You can see from these photos the additional area of the driver’s cage as well as the new padding and protective carbon fiber composite armor to prevent parts from coming into the cockpit.
One of the first areas addressed is the driver’s cockpit. They’ve widened the cockpit, added some bars, installed better padding on the cockpit area bars to soften the helmet impact, and added armor around the driver’s cockpit.
Additionally, they’ve changed the windows on the cars to allow easier access to the driver. They have also gone to a seven-point seatbelt harness that helps prevent the driver from sliding forward in the seat should he or she impact or experience sudden deceleration. The improvements they have made to the cockpit, especially those in the roll cage area around the driver’s helmet, were tested by Robert Hight when he had a vicious crash at Topeka. He impacted both guard walls hard and emerged virtually unscathed, crediting the changes to the cockpit for that.
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The changes made to the driver’s cockpit do add a little weight to the car so I asked Medlen if the added weight might have an adverse effect on the car’s performance. Surprisingly Medlen said that any weight added to the middle part of the Force cars actually seemed to benefit them. They found that the cars want more weight in the middle. So, in addition to a safer car the changes might actually help the car’s perform.
The Force camp seemed to be spending a lot of effort on trying to prevent parts and pieces from coming off of the car during a pass. Obviously any debris on the racetrack, no matter how small, is a serious problem for cars regularly exceeding 280 mph in the eighth mile! Retaining parts on the chassis, drive train and engine is complicated by the inordinate amount of vibration a nitro-burning engine and drive train transmits to the chassis on a normal pass, not to mention the unreal amount of stress transmitted to all parts of the car when it suffers from “tire shake” or some other malfunction. Keeping the parts of a car on the car and off the track is a major concern to the racers and sanctioning body.
I’ve heard that in the future the NHRA may start fining or deducting points from teams who have parts fall off of their cars onto the track.
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As you can see from these photos the Force team are making great efforts to keep parts from falling off the cars. On Ashley Force’s car they have enclosed the fire bottles with safety netting so that if they do shake loose they will not fall onto the track. They duct tape over all of the dzus-style fasteners that hold the parachute sheet metal to the car.