So, it wouldn’t matter if you were in a bracket car or a stock car or a Funny Car?
Hubbard: Nope. That’s a misconception -- you can get into really bad hits even at lower speeds. It really isn’t how fast you’re going down the track, if you get turned into the wall, that’s what is going to hurt you. Same thing with drag racing, same thing with oval track racing. You get turned up into the wall – it’s how fast you’re going into the wall that really matters.
 These are the resulting force diagrams for the neck tension using different types of head and neck restraints hitting a wall at 43.5 mph. The SFI 38.1 spec tests restraints subject to a 70G impact. A lower tension number is safer. You reach up around 950-lbs and above of tension, and injury/death can occur. |
In researching the HANS in other racing series, I’ve read where a crash with as low as a 30G load can seriously injure or kill you, and that the impact that killed Dale Earnhardt was around 40G. That doesn’t seem like a lot of force.
Hubbard: You can get crashes that low, and still get loads in your neck that can be fatal. In testing we’ve gone up to 100G and the HANS has worked to reduce the loads.
Jim Downing: But there were 14 guys in racing killed last year in America, most of them at short tracks – but you never hear about them because they’re at a local race track. Those guys are doing 80 MPH, and get turned into the wall and it’s all over – 30MPH in a street car kills people all the time, if you stop fast enough.
The HANS is visible at most of the highest forms of pro and amateur racing. But what about the lower levels, local racers who Jim referred to getting killed?
Hubbard: The real work for us now – everyone pretty much at the top levels of racing understand and use the HANS and that’s our best market penetration -- but it’s the guys that aren’t at the top of the sport, that’s where the real need is still to be found.
Granting that, you have an open forum here to our readers, which include John and Jane Average racer. How do we convince them to use a HANS device?
Hubbard: Tell them it’s an insurance policy. We know they’ll run down that track 100 times, 200 times, and that one time that they need it – it will pay for itself a hundred times
over. One, because they are alive. Two, because they’re not damaged and paralyzed or out of work for six months. And that’s really what usually happens – somebody gets damaged and they can’t go to work, and they go bankrupt.
Most of these bracket racers are working for a living; their daddy is not paying for their racing. It’s an extremely cheap insurance policy. They can wear it – pick a number – for 10 years. They don’t wear out.
Also, when you look at the amount of money even the lowest level racer would pay -- $865 – not paying that is an excuse, it’s not a reason, and it doesn’t make any sense. Even making this economic argument, bracket racers need to know that at the speeds they are going they are vulnerable.
Another counter-argument is that a racing death doesn’t happen very often. It could be argued that the FIA didn’t really get interested in racer safety until Ayrton Senna was killed, and that NASCAR didn’t until Dale Earnhardt Sr. was killed.
Hubbard: In both those cases it became visible that this could happen to anybody – even racers at the top of their profession. It doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen. Most racers that buy a HANS device or any other head and neck support, and the chances are they won’t ever need it. Now, they may need it to help reduce injury in a crash so they are not disabled or got a sore neck. I think most racers don’t really understand they need them.
