I rode in a friend’s Ferrari (1978 308) recently and while I love how it sounds… I often can not get enough of the turbocharged sound. So if you love the sound of turbochargers doing work here you go:
Link for you RSS peeps.
It may be an older video of ours, but I love it and cannot get enough.
Update: Apparently I decided to post this exactly two years after uploading it to YouTube. Odd.
Around this time of year I always debate whether or not I should get snow tires for my car. I know Mark has a set and puts them on (and refuses to take them off until practically the summer), but I’m always wondering whether it is worth the money.
On one hand snow tires offer a perception of safety in the snow (I’m told it snows a lot here in Rochester but I do not agree with that statement). On the other, I’ve gotten along just fine without snow tires (All seasons) and had a ton of fun doing it.
I do not need them for accelerating (AWD helps a lot in that regard) but I could benefit a ton in terms of Braking and steering. So should I stick with my all seasons (that worked wonderfully last winter) and experience with them or should I invest a few hundred dollars for snow tires (and probably wheels as snow tires for my wheels are a bit pricy)? What do you do?
Helmets are so varied in design and cost, so how do we know what helmets are good and what are not? A lot goes into that assessment but I hope I can shed some light on the topic.
Why Wear a Helmet?
Helmets are easy to use items that can save your life in a crash (seatbelts are more important though!) so you might as well get one for spirited driving. It does not take much force (ie, acceleration) to damage your brain. We perceive the world through that wonderous organ, so damaging it will affect how we live in most every way. It could affect your life so much as to end it! So keeping your head safe is a good idea. Side note: I wear helmets in pretty much every sport I do…lacrosse, snowboarding, auto racing, cycling to name a few. I’ve worn helmets often enough that I feel naked without them when doing those activities.
How Should It Fit?
Helmets should be snug, especially at first as they will only get looser. The helmet should not rotate/move freely on your head. However, it should not squeeze you so tight that it will cause pain and eventually headaches (I’ve had that happen before I knew better!).
For an autoracing helmet moving the helmet should move your head if you’re not resisting the movement. So if you leave it in a certain position on your head it should stay there. Other sports have other requirements for helmets, for example Lacrosse helmets are strapped to your head quite snugly as they are expected to be struck…often.
Ratings?
There are various certifications for helmets, the most famous of which are the ratings produced by Snell. Snell is a not for profit organization that tests all sorts of helmets. If you’re curious about how they test helmets YouTube does not fail in that regard! There can be various ratings so check your sanctioning body for acceptable ratings.
But why does it matter? For a few reasons: 1) you will never be allowed to race in any respectable sanctioning body without a certified helmet and 2) the certification guarantees a certain level of protection.
Weight?
Weight, believe it or not, affects the safety of the helmet. Weight added to your head means more momentum above your neck. That means a larger force applied to your neck in the event of a crash (this is also why the HANS device was invented). So a really massive helmet will injure you in a crash where no helmet would not.
Fatigue matters, especially in Rally! Extra weight that your neck has to carry will speed up how fast you fatigue. So the lightest helmet possible, with the same protection level, is preferred. However in order to keep it as safe at the same weight, special materials need to be used. Unfortunately for all of us this drives the cost up, but I think it is something worth spending money on.
Full Face vs Open Face
Rally is a motorsport which commonly uses open face helmets, while most of the other motorsports use full face helmets. If you’re curious to the difference visually, here is me wearing a full face helmet and mark wearing an open face helmet (facebook links do NOT require login). There are pros and cons to each of them:
Full face helmets provide a lot more protection to your face (teeth and nose) but come with the downside of trapping more heat and adding weight. While open face helmets provide less protection to the front of your head but cut down on weight and heat. But there is one unique thing in Rally that makes open face helmets dominant: Co-Drivers.
Rarely will a Rally co-driver wear a full face helmet. Why? Because they need to scream at the driver and a piece infront of the mouth muffles the critical sounds that much more. So it almost makes more sense for the driver to be wearing a full face (Sebastian Loeb) while the co-driver dons the open face.
Do you have a favorite helmet brand/style/color?
In keeping up the trend of posting YouTube videos that I find I’ll post a good example of why safety equipment matters:
I usually hate crash compilations (not the reason I watch motorsports) but I think it serves as a great example of what can and will go wrong in a Rally. The video works just as well on mute.
Link for you RSS readers out there.
Many people tend to think that roll cages only provide safety and some extra weight, but they’re forgetting something: what they can add is stiffness.
Because roll cages were mandated as required safety devices in oh so many racing leagues, clever engineers figured out that they could use them to make their cars better. I don’t know who did it first, but they decided to connect all the suspension points together with a tubular space frame and call it a roll cage. Suddenly the mass of tubes becomes a way to stiffen up the car’s chassis.
You might not realize just how much a normal street car’s chassis flexes under any sort of acceleration (0-60, cornering, braking, etc…). This flexing acts much like the suspension, in fact most go-karts depend on frame flexing as the suspension (also the tires). However this flexing in a normal car changes the geometry of the suspension which can make a car less predictable and much harder to tweak (suspension wise).
Connecting the points where the suspension meets the frame with tubing (aka roll cage) can significantly increase the stiffness of a stamped sheet metal frame. This will keep the suspension geometry closer to normal under hard accelerations and allow you to more consistently judge how your suspension is affecting your car. However in most cars, connecting the suspension points (strut towers) will require to send tubes through the firewall of the car. Do you notice the tubes going through the firewall on the Subaru US Rally Team car? You should not be intimidated by the firewall, cut through it and reseal it around the tubes!
So, if you’re going to add a roll cage, don’t just add it to be within your competition rules. Take advantage of the rules and stiffen up your car so you can better adjust your suspension. Also, it results in less deflection in the chassis, which Mark tells me means you’ll end up with “smaller cyclic loading” on it. That means you’ll have more use of the chassis before it fails from normal race stresses. HOORAY ROLLCAGE!!!
A friend of mine and I were having an argument about acceleration being a safety feature or not. I contend that a car that can accelerate in both directions (gas and brake) is safer than a car that cannot. I feel that a car that brakes quickly is good but also a car that can get out of the way is also good. Avoiding accidents sometimes requires a bit of brake as well as the gas.
What do you think about acceleration?
Safety Wiring is a pretty common thing in most motorsports. I like to think of it as a mechanical thread lock(Loctite/Teflon Tape), but much easier to remove.
What It Is
Safety wire is wire that is passed through holes in bolt heads that is twisted, wrapped and secured in such a way that the bolts cannot loosen without removing the safety wire. The wire is secured to either other bolts (preferable) or mounting points built in to the component.
Why Safety Wire?
Safety wiring is required for various motorsport leagues as it is the only safe way to secure certain critical bolts. Loctite and Teflon Tape can too often fail and let the bolt unscrew. It is impossible for the bolts to unscrew when safety wired correctly, without the safety wire first failing. It can also be thought of as a warning system. It is the first sign of failure without being a critical one.
Safety Wire is used most commonly on suspension and brake components. A failure of either of those would be catastrophic to the car and driver.
It is pretty simple to do, however it is tedious. Who better to explain how to do it than the website I stole the above picture from? NO ONE. Check it out.
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