Bigpower

This is a question for those of you who have a roll cage welded into your cars.

An incident that happened on the road yesterday got me pondering over the limitations of roll cage side impact/door bars in a crash.

Very briefly. I had the family in the car heading down to Cardiff yesterday, the sun was shining and the roads had dried out. There's a long stretch several miles outside Abergavenny.

The roads were relatively quiet and I sat happily about 50yds behind an old dear who was pottering along at the speed limit (60mph). She started to slow down and indicated that she was intending to take a junction on the right. I started to slow down and the gap between us closed to about 20yds.

The old dear turned right at the junction and began to pull across the road.

Out of habit I had a glance in my rear view mirror and saw an oncoming black Vauxhall Vectra fast approaching, I switched to my right wing mirror and clocked it overtaking me at approximately 80mph. Seeing what was about to happen I pulled way over to the left and stopped our car just at the point when the Vectra's tyres started to screech like a bitch.

Its ABS kicked as it was about to T bone the old dear. Where our car naturally should have been was open space and somehow the Vectra (now out of control) 'wanged' left, right and left again missing both cars.

The bell end driving the Vectra obviously thought that the reason 'we' were slowing was so that 'we' could take the right hand junction and had chosen not to use our indicators. So said bell end decided to overtake 'us' before we began turning at the junction.
Now even if that was the case it was beyond stupid on bell ends part.

As it was he quickly realised that there was an old dear in front of us and it was 'she' that was indicating and turning right, hence the reason for 'us' slowing down.

The first he knew about it was when she was staring at him in horror through her side window!

The Vectra driver clearly not wanting his VRN taken attempted to shoot off at speed....unfortunately for him he got caught up in traffic.

Typical valleys Vectra driver. I noticed that his drivers side window was already missing and had been covered with a feckin' plastic bag. His right wing mirror was also smashed up and covered in tape.


Anyway, as I say the incident got me thinking. If the Vectra had hit he old dear there's no doubt at all that she would have been killed.

Her little hatchback would have folded like a Coke can.

However I was wondering what would have happened had it been a car like my zed with full weld in cage and door bars etc. with side impacts at similar speeds (70-80mph) being more likely to take place on track.

Any suggestions as to the best structural design of door bar to help minimise damage (to the driver) during a side impact smash at speed?






I presume window netting and a fully encompassing seat helps quite a lot?

Probably the best example is the V8 2013 Courtney/Premat crash at Philip Island-



Even with all the advanced CAD design and computer stress analysis, it was probably the added benefit of the regs moving the driver's seat more in-board that prevented more serious injury. A modern road car will have the deformable crash structure that would lessen the impact into the other car (although ultimately the chassis rails will most likely penetrate through), whereas a competition car may have had these points beefed-up and will likely cause even more damage to the car it T-bones.

In the end there's only so much you can do cage-wise and still be able to get in and out quickly, but moving the seat further towards the centre of the car and rearwards so your body is covered by the 'B' pillar is about as safe as you can make it.

Cool, thanks very much for that

Just a final note with regards to the bell end driving the Vectra.

If the incident had occurred just a few hours earlier in the day when the road surface was wet, the old dear would have been browners' no doubt about it.

If that were the case then I'm sure the Police would deem information such as witness statements, VRN, A-H of the driver and passenger etc. as quite important however as the luck of the gods was shining on the old dear and she didn't become yet another 'death by dangerous driving' statistic the Police weren't even interested in taking the Vectra's VRN.