Your invitation to an intelligent discussion on vintage Porsche safety, Or random thoughts and a lot of questions, anyway.... Options

[horizontally-opposed]

The current post about r_towle's son and his close call with his 914 and a tree has been weighing heavily on me. It has also reminded me why it's important to be thankful to those who engineered the cars so well so long ago.

I posted the below in that thread in response to pictures of a race car with a ton of tubes in the floor to prevent intrusion, but think the subject probably deserves a thread of its own, and that it belongs in the Garage for several reasons, but mainly so the maximum brain trust can have its input. What we need is experienced minds, willing to think unconventionally about how to maximize our chances in the event of a collision on the road, track, or autocross.

I'm not sure I see roll bars as the solution, especially for street cars (and ESPECIALLY if it means your head is next to a nice, über hard bar), but I sure am willing to listen. Anyone who has experience with real crash testing or knowledge of applicable physics would be especially valued here.

Now, to my original post:

As to the bar-laden floor in the race car pictured above, it certainly looks like it will be harder for things to intrude into the cabin in the (let's hope VERY unlikely) event of an impact like the one seen in this thread.

However, one has to wonder if the energy absorbed by the 914 in this instance didn't play a part in preserving the lives of the two kids in the 914. Its "give" took a big chunk of the wallop out of what those kids would have experienced had there been rigid bars there, and the result (I suspect, but you'd have to do an extensive study to find out) was that their necks were subjected to a slightly lesser impact and their internals didn't have to slow down quite as quickly.

If the tree or pole had entered the cockpit a couple of feet back, it would have been a different story, of course. This demonstrates the erratic nature of car "accidents" and the difficulty (impossibility?) that faces engineers as they try to protect occupants. I think about the C-GT fatality in Fontana (having driven a C-GT there just before it happened...) and what killed those two was a side impact in which nothing intruded but the car simply came to a stop too quickly, too instantly. Their necks' didn't have much of a chance, if any. I sometimes wonder if they would have done better without helmets.

I've been thinking a lot about safety of late, and very unconventionally. Not so much because I think we should ditch helmets, HANS devices, etc., but because I think we should really be considering the lessons learned in production-car crash test engineering and how they might be adapted for race cars. Good seats are another key, and I agree with Patrick Long that we should modernize old race cars with modern seats, and wear HANS with helmets out there (extra weight of the helmet makes things tougher on your neck).

Problem is, all this is expensive, and I've seen very little discussion about how HANS or similar devices work without harnesses, i.e. with 3-point belts. Which then makes me wonder if those who autocross are actually less safe in modern street cars with a helmet on. Airbags and full-face helmets are just one thing that come to mind...

This is a hard subject, but there are good lessons for all of us to learn as we consider it.

The best news is we aren't studying it in tragedy with re: to Rocket. And for that, I am very, very thankful.

So let's learn from this near miss together...

pete

[sww914]

I think that cages in street cars may be more dangerous than nothing. In a racecar you're strapped into a race seat with a 5 point belt and you have a helmet on and you should have SFI padding on the cage at least where your helmet could hit the cage. In a street car with a cage you won't have a helmet on for sure, maybe not the seat or the 5 point belts, and probably not the SFI padding.
I'm not even convinced that 5 point belts are safer overall in a street car. They hold you in place really well, right up to the point where your neck breaks a la Earnhardt and Senna, without a Hans device.
I haven't offered up any suggestions, just criticisms.
I'm with the Cap'n on this one, the biggest problem is the nut behind the wheel. Unfortunately while you can train yourself you can't train everyone else, believe me I've been trying for years and I haven't made any headway at all.
That said, I've been driving like a maniac for 26 years with a grand total of one accident. When I was 17 I was rear-ended at a signal light. Not much opportunity to avoid that one, I saw it coming and I flinched, I admit it.