Very good points, if I ever revisit this topic I'll definitely contact you. Living in Australia I'm not sure visiting the factory would be an easy option though. One thing I should clarify with regards to "aerospace grade" polycarbonate, this is a slight paraphrase of the term used by the FIA when they conducted the canopy test they used the term "aerospace spec polycarbonate", so when I refer to aerospace-grade polycarbonate, I'm referring to what the FIA defines as "aerospace spec", which in that case was the fighter jet canopy.

@pauldavenport7403 your knowledge of poly carbonate is impressive. The focus of this video is on future solutions. More secure side windows and closed cockpits. Really simple and something which that FiA technical idiot Jerome Touquet will never figure out. FiA's silence on this matter is deafening but the coverup is normal. It has happened many times before

What Tänak's crash are you talking about?

​@@Thinking0012020 Monte Carlo

@@Thinking001 probably the one where he crashed into a lake

​@@britishgaming6that one was with Ford, I think. OP is probably referring to the Monte Carlo 2020 crash where Tanak was driving an I20 (sorry if this is a double post; KZfaq isn't showing my other reply as posted for some reason).

@Thinking001 i mean 2020 in Monte Carlo, when Tänak barrel rolled off a hill

RIP KEN AND CRAIG

He was well on his way to doing so, I feel his first WRC rally win wasn’t far off, he was frighteningly quick in Sweden that year.

I agree, Breen’s accident was very unique in the nature that the impact happened to land in a weak spot. Changing the regulation and safety standards for a ‘freak’ accident could put in jeopardy all of the other safety measures already in place

This post by Revup1 is the only content in this video, and in this comments section, that displays any amount actual understanding of the rules, regulation's, and requirements for safety inside a rally car. As a former safety steward for SCCA Pro Rally, Rally America, and the American Rally Association, I can confirm everything that Revup1 has said is absolutely accurate, and true. Mandating for changes in the windows would not have made a single bit of difference in the outcome of Craig's crash. Mandating a full faced helmet as others have suggested in the comments, would not have changed the outcome of Craig's crash. The real issue in Craig's crash was that a non-vehicle rated guard rail was placed next to the road. And had it not been Craig at a shake down for the rally, it is likely that, at some point, someone else would have also lost their life by taking a 6 inch log to the face at 50mph when they lost control of the car in that corner. That isn't something a full face helmet, or the lack of a window flap is going to prevent. Unless you make that ballistic aircraft rated polycarbonate look like it's mounted to the side of an MRAP door, the door frame of a Rally1 won't handle that level of force impacting it, or any other typical road going vehicle for that matter. At the end of the day, while the videos author has his heart in the right place, his understanding of the circumstances, and the engineering involved, is wildly off base.

@bigbuckoramma I see your point, but the thing is, the handrail consisted of two horizontal logs. The upper, and the lower. This meant both the top half of the door, and the bottom half hit the same sort of object at the roughly the same angle and the same speed. This makes it somewhat of a side by side test of the window and the bottom half of the door. The window was fully penetrated. The bottom half of the door wasn't even visibly dented. Furthermore, is it reasonable for there to be absolutely no window strength requirements in the Rally1 rules? The window is the only thing seperating crews from external debris. Furthermore, strong windows won't necessarily mame extraction and escape or medical access harder, especially if they're mounted in a quick release way, you can make things which are very strong in one direction, but not so strong in another. Think of train couplings, they're very simple to decouple, but when locked in, they can hold hundreds of tonnes. Adding a latching mechanism that can be undone by hand, but won't come undone from a hard impact is entirely doable. For this impact to be survivable, all the window needed was to be as strong as the bottom half of the door.

@@FailedRacers I am sorry to say, but this only solidifies my opinion that you are extremely out of your depth on the subject matter. The crash reconstruction is extremely easy to visualize if you consider the damage to the car. If you hit a vertical post, the top of the post will move away faster than the anchored bottom of the post where it is pivoting. The top rail will side slip the vertical post as it moves away from the car striking it, while the lower rail will get forced down to the ground under the vertical post. As the car sheers over the vertical post, the skid plate will ride up the lower rail and vertical post like a 50/50 grind on a skateboard. Simultaneously, the top rail will almost be floating in mid air, and simply go through the side window. Now, directly inside the window is a significant amount of impact foam, as well as the side guards on the seat for the head restraint system. The carbon that the seat pan, and subsequently the head side rails, is made from is significantly stronger than a polycarbonate window ever will be. That didn't stop the log either. The morbid reality is that Craig was likely thrown forward by the impact, and the log impacted the side of his helmet with tremendous force, as the weight of the car effectively shoved him into the log, and crushed his skull. Sorry if that is a bit graphic, but this is the morbid reality of racing accidents. We have seen what a small metal spring can do to a higher safety impact rated helmet with the Philippe Masa accident in F1. And even still, despite the halo and materials improvements on helmets, open cockpit helmets still suffer from damage, and drivers get concussions from debris impact. And we also have a prime example of a car impact with an actual vehicle rated guard rail, in the form of Robert Kubica's accident. Another prime example of the fact that freak accidents can, and will, happen. As for the mounting of a piece of polycarbonate...polycarbonate is extremely flexible, in all directions, by design. A ballistic canopy is not simply a 5mm piece of perspex bolted up in a fancy frame. The F-16 cockpit that you showed F1 testing during their Halo development, is a ballistic rated polycarbonate composite sandwich that is over 3/4 of an inch thick, and it's strength comes from the curvature of its shape, and the fact that there is nearly 4 inches of it mounted into the cockpit surround. We can also look at something like the Indy Car AeroScreen, developed largely by the same people who make the F-16 canopy. It is still 1cm thick, and is anchored into a titanium frame, that captures nearly 3/4 of an inch at the top and center rib, and nearly 1.5 inches at the bottom mounting to the chassis. And most of the impact resistance and strength of the system is provided by the titanium frame, which is essentially a Halo with a windscreen to keep debris out. The polycarbonate itself is not doing the heavy lifting, and it's intrusion resistance is bolstered by being installed on a curve, and bolted through the afore mentioned titanium frame, and it's only several inches tall. These are all things that you can not do on a typical side window without making it look like an armored car, because that is effectively what it would have to be, in order to work as you think it would/should. Because a large flat multi layer composite piece of ballistic polycarbonate capable of stopping a 6 inch log from penetrating it at 50+ MPH and stopping a ton of car, would have to be well over an inch thick, and the door frame to mount it would look more like the Presidential limousine, than a race car. A train coupler mechanism is not trying to grab onto and hold a piece of flexible plastic who's entire purpose is to deform and absorb energy under stress. A simple frame with a simple mechanical latching system isn't going to work to stop the kind of force loads you are talking about, any more than you can stop a car by standing in front of it. The side windows are already polycarbonate, and already riveted to the door frame. And actually increase the integrity of the door frame, as well as provide a lighter and safer alternative to glass. There is a reason things are done the way they are in a rally car, and not the way they are in a GT or Touring car. Like I said, your heart is in the right place, and that is commendable, but people with a lot more engineering knowledge and backgrounds than any of us here in the KZfaq comments section, have looked at these sorts of issues, and have yet to find a better alternative. And there is likely good reason for that. At the end of the day, whether we want to admit it or not, Rallying is the most dangerous form of professional motorsports on 4 wheels. And the very nature of the roads and surroundings rally takes place in, make it inherently dangerous. And no matter how safe we try to make the cars, or the roads, there will still be deaths in our sport. And when we can advance safety, we will. But oftentimes the circumstances are simply so specific, and so random, that no amount of engineering can prepare for the inevitable.

@@FailedRacers I think we are right to have the discussion, and regulations should be constantly in review to improve safety, and for that reason I've subscribed and I applaud your video for asking the question. However, conducting a forensic investigation based on what can be seen in a short video clip of a car being loaded onto a transporter is purely speculation, we don't know that the lower part of the door withstood anything, we don't know if a window 'failure' was the reason for the severity of the accident. I've know the FIA to introduce some stupid rules over the years, but by and large they always act to improve safety and I expect they will, eventually, do what is right in regard to Craig Breen's accident. I find it telling that @bigbuckoramma mentions MRAP doors. You can make a vehicle ridiculously safe, but from personal experience in another life I've lived, even MRAP's can be penetrated, and I've seen the aftermath of armoured vehicles being blown off roads without being penetrated at all, but trapping the crew inside resulting in death. Thanks for the reminder @bigbuckoramma, but I think it does reinforce the point of protection vs extraction. As this accident happened on a rally recce it would be pertinent to ask if the organisers had identified this danger on the stage, and if there was an intention to place a protective barrier in the location for the actual event.

I see your point about the angle being different, but I think that's negated by the significantly lower speed (I say

@@FailedRacers Regarding the amount of force, you're missing something else. The canopy only had to deflect the weight of the wheel, while the window would've had to arrest most of the weight of the car, as it's effectively the projectile being deflected in this case. And again, the area of impact is very much working against the window here, that log's impact area is much, much smaller than the wheel, and doesn't have the benefit of a rubber tire to absorb and distribute the load. This looks like a perfect storm of misfortune to me, with the only thing that could've stopped that log being armored glass, assuming the window itself doesn't get popped out of its mountings.

Yeah. I too see this as very hard to protect against. I'm not sure if a closed helmet would've helped in this case either. There's plenty that can and needs to be done, but at this point we just need to wait and see if FIA are actually ready to do what it takes. Deaths at rallies happen yearly though, although usually at much lower level, and the uncontrolled environment is inherently much much more dangerous than that of a racing circuit.

​@@griffinfaulkner3514another important factor is that the canopy windows used as demonstration are actually more similar in design to tank armor, as their effective thickness increases with the degree of slant. In cars, the windows are more similar to old tank armor, where the only way of strengthening is to increase thickness, increasing weight.

Easiest way around this is to hard wire the ac clutch to the battery with no intermediate switch other than the compressors over pressure switch. Or switch to an electric ac compressor and have the ecu log it's state during the race, anything out of place would show up in logs.

The way it's done in WEC is max cockpit temperature. Anything >32° and they get a warning. If it happens twice, a 20s time penalty.

The Dodge Challenger SRT Demon managed to figure out how to have air conditioning and not sacrifice horsepower

@@patrickracer43 incorrect, the Demon still uses an engine driven air conditioning system and sacrifices around 1 horsepower while it's turned on. For a car to not lose horsepower while air conditioning is turned on the air conditioning system would have to have an efficiency of around 110%, which would mean outputting more energy than it takes in, which breaks just about every known last of physics, most notably the first law of thermodynamics

There's a system in use in the WEC/GT racing that would work, based on a trick AC clutch that only engages when the engine is off-throttle, under braking. While I don't know the details, I wouldn't be surprised to find it was as simple as adding a pressure switch to the brake system that only allows the AC clutch to energize when the brake pedal is used, i.e when the power used by the ac has no effect on performance. Something like this would probably work fairly well on a rally car, where most courses are corner heavy...

U forgot about R.Kubica where guardrail penetrated car and almost killing him.

Winning is more important than comfort lol. It doesn’t get that hot with the roof vent open

Depends on the rally. In Acropolis, cockpit temperatures reach as much as 60°

@@FailedRacers I’m aware. I’ve been in cars with a cockpit temp over 150F during summer rallies. It’s still manageable as long as you’re hydrated and I can tell you that no one will want to run AC even in those conditions

Mostly weight savings. Any additional weight that isn't necessary adds fractions of a second, if not whole seconds of time. Same reason why drivers are expected to maintain good size and physicality.

After reading your comment i immediately thought of mclaren f1 and GMA t50 side window having another bar where the original purpose is structural integrity. I can see this would works on this case, and window doors can be easily fitted on the bottom section of the window. But it would introduce problem mostly spiritually since rally cars are int he spirit of modified road-going car, and having such feature probably would kill the spirit since you'll need an entirely new door model. I think there's more simpler and easier solution for it, but maybe we need to wait for the final report to truly understood the whole detail of the accident.

Yeah but if there isn’t even a regulation of how strong it needs to be that should be addressed

race planners should have walked te track... noticed the new fence... and did a risk assesment... hind sight 20/20 .... but.... just looking at how it was orientated before the crash was scary

@@keithromano3157There are all sorts off obstacles like that of rally stages, they are normal roads, I bet a car had been up and down that road 50 times.

@@alieffauzanrizky7202 I think they could do something else in general with safety in mind. Rally 1 cars had a tendency to loose their parts and panels in and accident,trunk lids flying around are quite common. If you loose a panel,the things behind it are exposed to any intrusions. They could add something like a small deflector made of poly-carbonate of whatever material into the door,like the Halo idea is not to make a canopy like the fighter jet but something to deflect large objects. Maybe 1/3 of the window,the closest part to the driver would work,I think you could simulate something like this to prevent direct hits on the occupants while being reasonable easy to rescue.

Good point well made sir.

A thicker window would not have to mean that driver extraction is harder though, you could keep access the same while still making the cars safer.

That too! The amount of fogged up windscreens in recent rallying is certainly a problem

@@FailedRacersnot to mention, instead of having an opening in the window, you could just have it somewhere else (Bonnet, roof, wherever) and redirect the air via a tube into the cockpit

Afaik rally cars already have electric heaters to combat fogging, but in very high humidity there's only so much you can do.

@@963robo IRC this hole is for giving documents on start, u can see in smaller local rallyies

The fact that NASCAR allowed drivers without a HANS device to drive at all as insane at that time! Jacky Stewart called out Earnhardt a few earlier during the 24h of Daytona that driving without neck protection could easily kill him. A few weeks later exactly that happened.. It could’ve all been prevented.

The only reason NASCAR mandated HANS devices was that three drivers passed before Dale and one more passed after (Kenny Irwin, Adam Petty, Tony Roper, and Blaise Alexander). NASCAR aren't saints, but that only brings to question how much we have to tolerate these things as "freak accidents" until they happen enough in a row that something needs to be done. The FIA is better than this. Jules' accident was a freak accident, yet they still mandated the Halo eitherway. They need to do better.

No Dale brought it on himself, it was a well know issues, with a know fix, all the information was avaliable to him, the sponser had said they would pay for the Hans device so he wasn't out of pocket. But he active protested again the requirement of the Hans device, and got other drivers to back him preventing them becoming mandatory before his death, he went so far as to referring to the Hans device as "that damned noose" to reports before the race.

@@therealdeemz_ The FIA had already been developing the Halo half heartedly for 5 years at that point. it began creation after the death of Henry Surtees in F2 and near fatal accident of Felipe Massa in F1, both in 2009

@@rolux4853 evidence?

Open face helmet allows stuck driver or co driver to yell out the window for help.

@@ericford911 Full face helmets don't go into your mouth. You can still shout fine. Have you ever worn a full face helmet?

I agree full face helmets should be a must, why not protect the hole face for everything.

@@Dingle-Berriesit is much more difficult for mouth to mouth resuscitation with a full face helmet. Each competitor has to do a specific test before the event to be allowed to use a full face helmet. Majority of helmets these days are semi open face.

They just don’t get it, another case of someone on there computer but having no concept of the reality

i agree 110% with you!!

Also that, but they're open on road sections for cooling

@@FailedRacers No not "also that". Teams are not in a rush to hand in their time cards. Transit times between stages are ample to discourage speeding on public roads. The 5 seconds it takes you to open the door will not make one lick of difference.

​@SteinOnkel yes, 'also that'... mainly that, in fact. Have you seen some of the gaps between stages at rallies like Ypres, for example? There are often around 30 minutes between the start of one stage and the start of the next one. So that's start one stage, complete it (potentially with issues - car or incident), get your timecard completed, drive the road section (where in Belgium the speed limits are unbelievably slow and there could potentially be traffic with some of the stages being at the end of the working day on a Friday near towns), stop to make any repairs or at the very least check tyre pressures, arrive at ATC and check in, start the next stage. Appreciate it may seem a piece of cake to open the door, but remember that the co-drivers sit very low and far back, so it won't be as easy as you and I opening the door in our road cars and passing something over it either. These two elements together - the window slot is pretty much necessary, rather than a 'nice to have'.

With regard to the point in the video that windows currently have to be removable without tools, the window vent doubles as handle that can be used by marshals to pull the window out.

@@jameswilliamson512 "You and I in our road cars" - speak for yourself there, buddy. I'm a co-driver and know damn well where I sit, thankyouverymuch. Repairs? Why would that factor in? If your car breaks before the next service - that's tough luck. Transit times are exactly that: transit. Again, if the transit times are not long enough and force teams to rush, that is a completely separate issue. It seems to me most people commenting on this video have never been within five feet of a rally car and have no idea what they are talking about.

Or better, use transponder with gate.... U don' t need hole or open door.

The ac gas is 400-600 grams only it’s not 4 kg of gas. It disappears into the air without you noticing . And newer gas is beter for the environment.

@@ThaDutchDK1989 Yes, new gas is better for environment, but toxic for people in contact with water and selfignition in 405C (761ºF). I thin we need AC not only for cooling but as anti dew device

AC should become mandatory as it is for GT and WEC cars

Condensation is minimal, though? You're not chilling the cars down to extremely low temperatures either, unlike a normal road car, so there'd be not much of an issue there Nets are illegal as well for a lot of countries.

Air conditioning would add weight, but if it's mandated, everyone has the same disadvantage. The rules in WEC for aircon failure are a warning followed by a 20s penalty if it isn't fixed, the roof scoops would have to stay as a backup, maybe with an opening or closing flap for if the aircon is working or not. I think mandating that the air con must come from a production car would make it less likely to fail as well, since air conditioning failure doesn't usually happen on cars under a year old.

​@@FailedRacers most AC failures come from debris puncturing the evaporator.

I can understand why you're unhappy with this video, but there's a couple of things I should explain that may have been misunderstood here. I was initially unsure whether to post this video, I made a community post asking whether it would be acceptable, if the outcome was close I would not have posted the video, but 95% of respondents said that I should post it. Regarding the simulation footage, as was mentioned at the start, this footage was not a reconstruction, but an illustration. It was a different corner, at a higher speed in dry conditions. This was for viewers unfamiliar with what happened to visualise roughly how the car went off. The use of simulator footage was deeply considered before I made the decision to include it. You're probably right that I should have mentioned other contributing factors though, the hand rail absolutely should have had a bale in front of it, that would have almost undoubtedly changed the outcome. In terms of the windows, my issue is not with polycarbonate itself. Polycarbonate windows are safer than glass. My issue is with the regulations, which don't have any requirement for the strength of the windows whatsoever. I referred directly to the specific relative FIA documents. I don't think it's reasonable for there to simply not be any regulations on the strength of the windows. It's also possible for a strong window to be removable without the use of tools, this can be through the sort of latching mechanism used, it's also possible for some materials to be strong in some directions and weak in others, such as having a window that's hard to push inwards from the outside, but easy to push outwards from the inside or pull outwards from the outside. With a strong window spec, there are still many solutions to extraction. The decision to post this video was not taken lightly and was only made after significant approval from a relatively large number of people. Robust discussion about safety concerns is how changes happen, and it's how modern rally cars have become as safe as they are, but rallying will never be 100% safe and improvements can be made. This video discussed one possible improvement.

The helmet today is much better than Senna's though. It may be nothing if he had today's helmet.

No, just need a tamperproof thermometer, Like WEC, u get warning and next penalty

There's ways around this too, having some sort of latching mechanism that can be undone by hand, but won't come undone when pushed inwards would solve the escape issues

Airliner cockpit window must withstand a frozen turkey at max continuus speed (cruise)

There can never be no risk, but air conditioning wouldn't really cost that much. These are million dollar cars. If you mandate that they have to use an air conditioning system from a road car, it really wouldn't cost Toyota or Hyundai that much to fish an air conditioning unit out of a Yaris or an i20, and it wouldn't be likely to go wrong either. From the viewer's perspective, it doesn't make a difference if the cockpit temperature is 32° or 50°, at the moment, it's usually the latter.

I agree and also say that the wooden fence was not made for safety of the road users like a standard guardrail but a boundary for the pedestrian to not fall off the cliff. Unfortunately accidents happen and can be deadly

This is where having some form of latching mechanism would work. For example holding the window in place with some sort of lever, if the driver or someone outside the car twists it, the window will detach, but if it's pushed or pulled on, it won't move.

Although it seems suspicious, the FIA just generally doesn't seem to release reports on fatal crashes. They did with Jules Bianchi's crash, but other fatal crashes haven't had their reports released. I should state that the regulations were written without the benefit of hindsight, whilst this video was. I don't believe the FIA was negligent here as this most likely isn't something anyone would have thought of without the benefit of hindsight.

I bet the boss man had a good laugh about that 😂

That's interesting, I didn't get to see much of Sweden thisvyear because I was in Bathurst watching the 12hr, do you know which stage it was when he lost it?

‘That little something’ happened a bunch of times in motorsport history… and they all leave us very young.

This is why it'd be mandated, and also required to be based on a production car's air conditioning to prevent teams from developing expensive WRC spec aircon. Sure it'd take power, but all the cars would lose the same amount of power, and if everyone is slower, noone is slower.

@@FailedRacers Even if the AC is been changed The fact that the Fence was made from wooden logs instead of wooden planks is questionable too. a Log is tougher then a plank Why place them there if a year prior they were absent?

This is true, but modern air conditioning systems don't reduce the power by much, maybe 1-2hp. There would be a drop in performance from air conditioning, but it would be such a small drop that it wouldn't be noticeable.

​@@FailedRacersWhile this is correct, I'm sure you know how packed the rally cars are. I doubt there is much room for a/c to be able to be fitted. Yes the performance drop will be minimum. It's a drop all the same. Also there would be when the a/c to be used either on for everyone on a particular rally or off?

My idea for this is based on the rear windows. The rear windows are held in with a series of metal pins that you twist to remove. If these are made of titanium and used as the front window mounts, they can be strong in the event of a crash and easily removable

@@FailedRacers sounds reasonable

​@failedracers4452 Another idea would be to have handcranked windows that raise and lower like on old cars. The mechanisms are light and easy to use, would allow the driver and co-driver to open the windows to talk to the marshals, etc.

But are those metal pins that hold the rear windows fixed from inside or outside the car? Because exactly, the issue is having a mechanism that makes it easy for crews to get out of the car in case of a crash that could jam the door, if it’s fixed from outside the car, the crews inside wouldn’t have a way to twist those pins to get out, also hand cranked windows would very likely going to jam/break the mechanism in a sideways crash that damages the door, so Rallying is in a spot kinda similar to very early formula racing was, where having no driver protection was better because having the driver being launched outside the car in a crash was more safe (at that time) than having the driver to stay inside the car while it’s crashing/rolling, in Rally, very likely that they consider more safe having weaker windows for making it easier for crew/rescue being able to pull them out when needed, also yeah, Rallying is the most dangerous form of Motorsport as well, circuits are very controlled environments, while there are all sorts of things in public roads where Rally cars go flying

As far as I'm aware Fulton hasn't said anything since, understandably

Which i unfortunately experienced when Ken Block died wanting to know what happened only end up to those bad crowd