The aero screen is undoubtedly a great innovation in INDYCAR safety. But, I often worry about a scenario in which a car becomes engulfed in flames with an unconscious driver and/or a car flipped on its top - and how long it will take to extract the driver in such an emergency.
I can say from experience that one of these cars can be rolled back over pretty quickly. It's something we practice. The goal is to keep the fire away from the driver, so sometimes you want the car on its side to avoid that "chimney" effect. In those cases, we put the fire out first, and then extract the driver afterwards. Having said that, a lot of people mistakenly think that a driver's suit is fire-proof, but in reality, they only provide seconds of protection, so it's critical that rescue teams are either using extinguishers to protect the driver or getting them out as quickly as possible. The Romain Grosjean F1 fire is a great example of how a rescue crew couldn't immediately perform an extraction and used extinguishers to knock the fire aside long enough to allow the driver to escape.
The aero screen is undoubtedly a great innovation in INDYCAR safety. But, I often worry about a scenario in which a car becomes engulfed in flames with an unconscious driver and/or a car flipped on its top - and how long it will take to extract the driver in such an emergency.
I can say from experience that one of these cars can be rolled back over pretty quickly. It's something we practice. The goal is to keep the fire away from the driver, so sometimes you want the car on its side to avoid that "chimney" effect. In those cases, we put the fire out first, and then extract the driver afterwards. Having said that, a lot of people mistakenly think that a driver's suit is fire-proof, but in reality, they only provide seconds of protection, so it's critical that rescue teams are either using extinguishers to protect the driver or getting them out as quickly as possible. The Romain Grosjean F1 fire is a great example of how a rescue crew couldn't immediately perform an extraction and used extinguishers to knock the fire aside long enough to allow the driver to escape.