Gordon's Pocono Crash-64 G's

BobbyFord

BobbyFord

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64 G's is pretty amazing. It's even more amazing that with figures like that he wasn't seriously injured.

Jeff Gordon said Friday his Hendrick Motorsports team still doesn't know exactly what caused a right-front brake rotor to disintegrate, sending Gordon's #24 DuPont Chevy slamming into the Turn 1 wall at Pocono Raceway June 11. "A lot of us have seen issues with brakes - and our hub issue at Charlotte," Gordon said. "A lot of it has to do with where we're at with our cars and the speed and the setups that we're running that are just putting a lot more stress on parts of the race car that we're not used to seeing. We don't have a definite answer yet." Gordon did say the team has sent what was left of the rotor to be analyzed. The #24 had the same brake package as teammates #5-Kyle Busch and #25-Brian Vickers, neither of who had trouble. The #48 of Jimmie Johnson had a slightly different package, and Gordon said his team would probably use that setup when it returns to Pocono next month. Gordon added that the crash registered 64 Gs, and after an initial consultation in the infield care center, medical officials kept him longer. "I was ready to walk out of the infield care center, and they came in with the telemetry numbers and said, 'Wait a minute. We think you might want to stay a little bit longer,'" Gordon said.(SceneDaily.com)(6-17-2006)
 
64 Gs? WOW! :eek:

Brake autopsy is a lot better than Driver Autopsy, that's for sure!
 
do indycars even hit the wall that hard?

or for that matter..fighter jets..

and did the back box record 64 G's or is that were it even got knocked out?
 
64G's not likely. What the heck was Fullers wreck then?????

The force of gravity when you sit, stand or lie down is considered 1 G. In normal activity, we rarely experience anything other than 1 G. But flying a combat aircraft such as the F-16 is not exactly normal. The F-16 is capable of pulling 9 Gs without even trying. But the effect of 9 Gs on your body will be significant. As you pull more Gs, your weight increases correspondingly. Your 10-pound head will weigh 90 pounds when you pull 9 Gs!

http://www.voodoo.cz/falcon/agf.html
 
Bucky Badger said:
64G's not likely. What the heck was Fullers wreck then?????

The force of gravity when you sit, stand or lie down is considered 1 G. In normal activity, we rarely experience anything other than 1 G. But flying a combat aircraft such as the F-16 is not exactly normal. The F-16 is capable of pulling 9 Gs without even trying. But the effect of 9 Gs on your body will be significant. As you pull more Gs, your weight increases correspondingly. Your 10-pound head will weigh 90 pounds when you pull 9 Gs!

http://www.voodoo.cz/falcon/agf.html
Click to expand...




Here's a little something I found on the subject...

E = 0.5m(v sin(t))2

where t = the angle between the vehicle’s center of mass as it impacts the wall, and a tangent to the wall at the point of impact. If we assume an average impact angle of 30 degrees or less, the actual energy of the car hitting the wall is 25% of what it would be head-on (sin 300 squared = 0.25). Therefore, shallow angle impacts tend to be less severe than more direct hits.

We have heard that drivers sustain loads as high as 100 g’s in an accident. 1 ‘g’ is the force equal to one earth’s gravity on your body. 100 g’s would be equivalent to a person lying on you weighing 100 times as much as you. Not a pretty sight I’m sure.

Although the general public is familiar with the term ‘g’ forces in a racing accident, actually gravity has nothing to do with the severity of a crash. The same race car traveling at 200 mph in outer space (and weighing zero) hitting an immovable concrete wall would sustain the same damage as it does here on earth. Gravity acts in the vertical direction. For the most part, a race cars velocity (and energy) is in the horizontal direction. So gravity, or ‘g’ forces are just a way for the average person to understand the magnitude of the force felt by the driver.

Let’s try to explain this in simpler terms. If a bird feather, which is not very dense (i.e. it has almost zero mass), were to impact a wall at 200 mph, it would sustain almost zero damage because it has almost zero energy to dissipate. Likewise, an Indy Car traveling at 200 mph has less than 1/2 the energy of a 200 mph NASCAR Winston Cup car to dissipate because it has less than 50% of the mass. That same Indy car has four times as much energy to dissipate at 200 mph than it does at 100 mph because energy is a function of speed squared. To look at it another way, a crashing car would apply a force 4 times as great on a concrete wall at 200 mph than it would at 100 mph.

The trick to driver safety is to dissipate the energy of the vehicle over a distance great enough to allow the drivers body, and the car, to decelerate at a reasonable rate. To exaggerate what I mean let’s use this analogy - if a 200 mph Indy car gradually comes to a stop in 1,000 feet, the driver feels very little ‘g’ forces on their body because the deceleration ‘a’ is very small. If a 200 mph race car hits a wall head on and comes to a stop in the distance it takes for the front of the car to crush against the driver’s body, fatal injury results because the deceleration ‘a’ is very large and the immovable wall exerts an equal and opposing force (i.e. the mass of the car and driver times a very large deceleration ‘a’ against the car and driver, until they stop. The human body can not withstand that amount of force.
 
I couldn't even process all that.

How hard was fuller's wreck then, head on into a curvatured wall
 
BF, that was great, but as Magnethead said, that's pretty hard to follow if you haven't studied physics much. I still can't fathom anyone surviving a 64G stop no matter what. That might have been the force from the car, but when that force finally got to Jeffy, it had to have dissipated quite a bit. Even the helmet will help to dissipate some of that force which is what it's designed to do. So while the crash itself might have been at 64G's, Jeffy would have had a very difficult time surviving all of that energy. There was a great video on the net of a reporter who took a ride with one of the Blue Angels and he passed out three times before they hit 9G's. The pilots can survive because they not only are prepared, but they also have G suits that help them. However, even those pilots who have experienced these G's so often probably wouldn't survive even half the 64G's.

Having said all that, I wonder exactly how many G's Jeffy's head actually experienced during that wreck.
 
^ what he said

The black box is attached to the chassis, Not to the helmet, so yes, it has to be substantially more than what the driver himself felt. Between the seats, the HANS, the suits, the sheet metal (which take the brunt of the energy), the soft wall, and the helmet, I'd say it was near or under 5 G's.
 
You can't compare the G's pulled by a pilot with that of a wreck. The reason they pass out at 9 G's is because those are sustained forces (ie climbing) whereas a wreck is almost instantaneous (snap, it's over).

Now put ANYONE in 64 G's for a couple of seconds and there won't be anything left to ask "how are you doing."

I'm pretty sure some F1 racer holds the record, somewhere around 100. I saw that on a special about the safety of racing on Discovery (or the like)...
 
I didn't see Fullers' wreck, was that a direct hit or glancing side blow?
 
nearly head on into the first opening on the backstretch in the inside wall
 
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