From: Jay Mitchell <jemitchell@compuserve.com>
>Mark wrote:
>>I agree. Belts don't rip. If you put enough force to that belt to rip
it,
>>it would cut the driver in half first.
Jay replied:
>Unless it had something wrong with it in the first place.
Bingo.
>>NASCAR is just covering their butt.
>I'm sure they'd do that regardless, but the crash didn't look severe enough
to me to cause a fatality.
I've been saying that ever since I first saw the film. Non-racers around my
office keep jabbering about how he crashed into a wall at 180, as if his
direction vector was perpendicular to the wall. And these folks are
technicians and engineers!
>The nose of the car was not crushed the way it's been in past severe
crashes. When I first saw the
>footage, I couldn't believe it had killed Dale. I'm not claiming to be an
expert on this, but so
>far I can believe that there could have been something wrong with the lap
belt.
Certainly. I hear a lot of talk about HANS, and that somehow its absence
here and some NASCAR duplicity in that absence caused the fatality. I don't
buy it. NASCAR drivers have climbed out and walked away from similar
crashes for decades. What did they have? A working harness. I don't know
that Dale did not have a working harness, but it sure would explain a lot.
A materials failure is not something we are used to in a 3" lap belt, but it
is surely not impossible. Another angle is what if it was not a materials
failure plain and simple, but a design flaw in the car that allowed the belt
to be cut in the crash. The idea that the belt was damaged by the car in
normal use seems unlikely, given the newness of the belt and the scrutiny
I'd suppose the harness would get as a matter of course.
The lap belt is the fundamental base of automotive control and crash safety,
on or off the track. A failure here, for whatever reason, makes other
crash-survival measures pretty much moot.
Two things seem likely:
The failure of a lap belt would go a long way towards explaining this level
of injury in this type of crash.
The cause of the belt failure is going to of keen interest to Simpson and
the car constructor.
Phil Ethier Saint Paul Minnesota USA
1970 Lotus Europa, 1992 Saturn SL2, 1986 Suburban, 1962 Triumph TR4 CT2846L
LOON, MAC pethier@isd.net http://www.mnautox.com/
"It makes a nice noise when it goes faster"
- 4-year-old Adam, upon seeing a bitmap of Grandma Susie's TR4.
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