Behind Some Of The Worst Racing Crashes In History | The Ultimates: Racing | Spark

in motorsport the glory of winning masks a risk that all competitors accept you'd be kidding yourself if you thought you were going to go racing but you're not going to have a crash these crashes are extraordinary pushing the human body to its limits sometimes with fatal consequences you're having an aircraft action you're not having a car accident it's kind of like jumping out of an intercity train i would say if you were trying to replicate that experience at home welcome to the violent world of the ultimate racing crashes [Music] in a roadside accident a driver will experience a force of 30 g on their body this sudden deceleration can have devastating consequences even at low speeds 50 percent of all fatal crashes have a delta v below 30 miles an hour but in racing collisions the g-force driver's experience is now into the hundreds i went head-on into the wall at about 210 miles an hour and so i mean literally i never lifted the throttle trace just went like straight down and you know when you're flying through the air at 130 140 mile an hour that's not very satisfying you know you know that it's not going to be pretty when you land and yet today 99 times out of 100 the racers will walk away with only minor injuries i didn't have a headache i didn't i didn't black out i didn't nothing this program examines the pivotal crashes that rocks the motorsport world and shocks the viewing public it will investigate the accidents themselves go on to explore the aftermath and the victims battle for survival from the post-war years when the dynamics of a crash weren't understood in every season one in seven drivers lost their lives to the latest developments which today keep races alive [Applause] but of all the disasters one had the most profound effect captured live on television this single crash shook the racing fraternity to its very core its aftermath brought about sweeping alterations to racetracks across the world to slow the cars the down marino grand prix on the 1st of may 1994 was a black day in motor racing history well formula 1 had been 12 years without a fatality of any kind and there had been no enormous name to die in formula one for many years there was an entire generation of formula one drivers who had grown up and gone through the schooling formulas and into formula one not even considering death as a factor the racing community almost believed that they'd managed to tame the effects of an impact but they were wrong this crash reminded them of the fatal nature of their business and took the life of formula one's leading light [Music] [Applause] ayrton senna was one guy who could not die in a race car he was just too good he was the mozart of formula one drivers he was meticulous he was brilliant he couldn't die cena had reached the point where he was unquestionably the man he was the benchmark he'd won the championship three times at that time imola in northern italy was one of the fastest tracks in formula one thus one of the most exciting to race on but that weekend started badly when cena's fellow brazilian rubens barry kellow crashed during friday's qualifying session [Applause] sena was deeply upset by that accident went to visit uh barry keller was relieved he was okay but there was there's no question that friday evening it everybody had been given a little bit of a jolt here saturday of course we had um the death of roland ratzenberger the fact that ratzenberger's crash was the result of a car failure was of little consequence a visibly upset cena even confessed to his girlfriend that he didn't want to race the next day he died 24 hours later from a crash at imola's notorious flat-out corner tamburello bend tambarello was this sweeping left-hander which was technically not a particularly difficult corner the problem was that it had this wall on the outside but that's why it was so exciting you had disaster right there you literally were looking disaster in the face in that concrete wall this is a reconstruction of the view from senna's car as you approach tamburlo bend at nearly 230 kilometers an hour to understand why cena may have crashed you need to know a little about the science that keeps these cars on the road the technology is such that cars have become quicker through corners straight line speed doesn't really mean an awful lot you have a combination of tyre technology and car technology and the two together have combined to make these phenomenal machines through corners formula one cars race at speeds of up to 330 kilometers an hour the car's hold on the track is from a combination of mechanical grip generated by the suspension and aerodynamic grip from the wings and all of that must go through the tires [Music] now racing tyre is fundamentally different to a road car tyre surface temperature of a racing tyre is around 150 to 200 degrees c somewhere in that in that window if you were able to put your hand on the tyre and pull it away it would be coated in rubber it's that sticky it's like it's all it's all it's approaching chewing gum but at speeds greater than the takeoff velocity of a jet aircraft the cohesion created by the high tyre temperature is not enough to keep the car on the road this is where downforce comes in the aim of downforce is to increase the force pressing the car onto the circuit onto the tarmac and that's to increase the friction between the the tyre and the track designers have discovered that accelerating the airflow under the car creates a negative pressure which sucks it into the road the closer you bring the car to the road the greater the downward force [Music] but it's a risky business because if the car makes contact with the tarmac all this downforce is suddenly lost [Music] as senna was about to negotiate the tamburello bend for the seventh time sparks were seen coming from the rear of his car a sure sign it was bottoming out when the belly of the car hits that means that the wheels are now sitting too high in relationship to the car to do you any good for for maneuverability for steering in 1994 formula one cars would often bottom out on straights with no consequence but during cornering it was a potentially hazardous situation we've all had conquers on strings and swung them around our heads and if you cut the string the conker flies off it's exactly the same of the racing car if you lose adhesion or grip with the circuit you fly off the circuit lap seven of the san marino grand prix cena crashed the tamburlo bend one of the world's greatest racing drivers earth and senna has died after a horrifying crash today at the san marino grand prix in italy all of a sudden the image of formula one changed it was back to a blood series worldwide and formula one had been like that in the 60s and early 70s but now you were in the 1990s an era where safety and good health and the denial of death by society as a whole you know we'd quit smoking we'd gotten more fit uh we didn't want to have heart attacks anymore western society as a whole was denying death and formula one was going along with it that you prolong life as long as you absolutely could now you have a guy in his prime boom gone the shock of cena's deaths with his enormous and i went to his funeral in fact carried him to his last resting place and when that accident happened brazil brazil came out in morning i mean the roads were lined 10 deep for the funeral procession the fact airtan cena's death was witnessed live by millions sent shockwaves across the world but inside the racing fraternity people were still trying to understand how he'd been killed at all that shouldn't have been a fatal accident because cars went off the circuit quite frequently and they're built so strongly even then that they should it should have been able to withstand the impact and he would normally have been expected to walk away from that car he was just unlucky because the impact was such a tie was thrown back hit him on the head and killed him formula one quickly introduced drastic new safety measures the car's sides were built up and wheel tethers were added to keep them from reaching the drivers at the same time circuits across the world were altered to slow them down and tamburlo bend would never be the same again at every given point no matter how safe we think we're making the sport the danger is still there but then that is the essential element of the sport and people think motor racing is safe to do well it is until the wrong accident occurs there's something very gladiatorial about the sport these guys put themselves on the line every time they get into that car no matter what there will always be crashes but today's drivers face a different world to those who raced in the terrifying early years [Music] when motor racing resumed after the second world war europe was shattered but although the risks in such a devastated environment were extreme the passion to race was all the more great because it represented freedom the really great thing about immediate post-war racing was the sense of relief i think and that was best expressed to me by george abacassis the great british privateer of the time who founded the hwm team and i said to him once um george you know in the late 40s when you resumed racing on the continent wasn't it dangerous and he took his cigarette and it's holder out of his mouth gorgeous george and said good lord doug no it wasn't dangerous at all he said you've got to remember for the first time in six years we weren't being shot at [Music] i remember going to my father and saying i want to be a racing driver he nearly went ballistic but to cut a long story short he said if you're going to race you're going to wear a crash hat and i can remember turning to my phone i said dad that's a bit [ __ ] you know the fast drivers these are people like shiron and sommer and they weren't wearing crash hats they wore these cloth helmets we didn't wear seat belts because when you have a shunt of course the likelihood of fire was immense so really if you were lucky enough you'd be thrown out and hope you landed on something not too hard [Music] but this daring mystique came to a sobering end in a horrifying accident with disastrous consequences in 1955 at le mans in 1955 i was driving for mercedes-benz and i was teamed with fangio and uh pier levesque of course was in in one of the messages as an invitation drive because he'd done so well the year before pierre levesque driving a mercedes um crashed up and over the tail of an austin healey driven by lance macklin and the mercedes impacted on top of the bank in front of a spectator enclosure and broke up and the front suspension and engine of the sadis was thrown through the crowd like a torpedo and the mercedes held itself like a thunderbolt into an enclosure packed with spectators it was a tragedy because so many people who are just there to see a race i mean a driver accepts the accepts the dangers but for it to go in and be the public or a marshal or something that is fairly unacceptable what was a terrible freak accident produced such a devastating death toll that it very nearly ended motorsport the grim record that will be remembered from this race at lamar is of some 80 dead and more than 100 injured across the world races were cancelled and many countries including switzerland have banned racing to this day [Music] but even after this tragedy the authorities were incapable of improving safety for the drivers people generally look over their shoulder and see things through rose-colored glasses and there were the good old days if you raced as a formula one grand prix driver for a period of five years the batting average was that there was a two out of three chance you were going to die so there were bad years it would take yet another big name to crash to improve safety but jackie stewart's horrific experience the 1966 belgian grand prix proved for the aftermath was just as deadly as the impact jackie stewart smashed broadside into the stone abutment of a barn that was there and that bent the car in two crushed in the top of the cockpit until the cockpit opening was only 10 inches wide it twisted jackie's pelvis round so he was lying effectively on his side in the cockpit and i was trapped for some 20 odd minutes in the car semi-conscious coming and going in and out of consciousness with the electrics not being able to be switched off and me not being able to get out the car and the fuel tanks burst and the cockpit then filled up with fuel because he was on full tanks there was nowhere for the fuel to go and it began to top up the cockpit so he effectively was laying strapped and trapped in a bath of petrol i was taken eventually when they found an ambulance to a what they called a medical center which was just concrete floor and looking around you told me that the first thing that struck him was that there are all these stubbed out cigarette butts on the floor around him this was an eerily sobering experience for stewart in which he realized that it was imprudence not bravery that sent drivers to their deaths everybody knew the sport was dangerous it wasn't as if suddenly we found that tiddlywinks was dangerous if you broke your nail and you get some terrible infection underneath your nail i mean this was something that we knew we were losing lives on and we knew that cars crashed and we knew that we were sometimes catching fire we knew all of those things but there were no adequate protection or amenities to either suffocate fires quickly enough or get drivers out of cars or get them to hospitals properly as a result of stewart's tireless campaigning by the late 70s rapid medical response was compulsory in racing however the drivers were still vulnerable and one in seven was dying on the race track each year in order to prevent more fatalities the crash needed scientific management but it would take until the 80s for a major step forward to be passed down from a device that had been used to understand passenger car injury for over a decade when we run a car into the barrier at the proving grounds for the development of a passenger car for safety we put accelerometers on the chassis and that gives us the basic what we call crash pulse or crash signature of the structure of the car the accelerometer acts like a black box in an airplane analyzing what happens to the car's chassis as it crashes by placing this accelerometer into the race cars the engineers could record the real crash in microscopic increments of time this would tell the engineers precisely when and how the crash happened and what forces injured the driver [Music] for the first time the racetrack had become an extension of the safety laboratory and the drivers their test pilots the results we had were really quite surprising because almost 90 percent of the injuries 89 were to the foot and ankles or distal orthopedic injuries and this we felt was an area that we could make a real difference we estimated the driver's feet at the wall at 45 miles an hour that would be like jumping off maybe a seven story building and landing on your feet their ankles were shattered the problem was is the driver was situated in the car in such a way that his legs actually extended beyond the imaginary axis of the front wheels so the first thing that ran into something to absorb energy after the nose of the car was gone with the driver's feet as a result of this analysis the designers reinforced the car's nose cones to withstand an incredible 40 tons impact force and crippling injuries to the feet and ankles practically disappeared overnight but unfortunately in crash safety the solution of one problem just creates another for the engineers and this new strong nose cone would become a devastating weapon in a car to car impact if you sort of throw a dart through a piece of paper the energy just stays in the darts and the dark keeps on going at the same speed so you're not actually managing the energy you're just one structure's moving through another structure 2001 was a difficult year for alex zanardi he'd return to the us cart series after a disappointing spell in formula one but at the lautering 500 race in germany alex was back on form and giving it his all we were near the end of the race about 13 laps or so to the end of the race and zanardi was leading and he had a pip for fuel i was watching in the medical center the tv monitor there and saw alex uh leave the pits and get onto the pit access road and he in his uh hard charging style that he always has he was really going too fast he lost control on the pit access road went backwards across the racetrack and much to my horror was hit broadside by alex tagliani's car this is a reconstruction of what viewers witnessed on their tv screens the collision was unavoidable [Music] when cars drive at speeds of 230 kilometers an hour they travel a whole car length in just 10 000 of a second and in one complete second the length of a football pitch driving at such speed tagliani would have seen zanardi station in the road just over a second before impact i thought personally after seeing so many crashes that we were going to be dealing with a double fatality and of course my heart sank i was petrified as a matter of fact we pulled up to the scene i got out the truck and started running up the track to the car and as i got close i started slipping and it was a banked track slipped and fell under my knees and kind of slid up to the car when i that was when i saw you didn't have any legs terry called me on our private radio channel and he said this is bad he said it's really bad he said both legs are gone and i said what do you mean gone he said they're gone and i said is there anything that we can salvage anything we can save he said no they're destroyed and he said he he's dying i've done a lot of road trauma in the past and that kind of injury in a in a public setting is almost a certain fatality in the thighs the veins are huge just think take five liters and put it in a bucket and then put a hole about size of a quarter in it in two places and see how long it takes to drain and that that's basically what we were dealing with alex was white as a ghost looked like a ghost he was unconscious his head eyes had rolled back in his head he had no response at all zanardi was losing blood rapidly dr olvi fed three ivs into his body to manage this blood loss this kept him alive but the diluted blood lacked the vital oxygen needed to feed his brain i told him to get him in the helicopter and head for berlin i went back inside with terry to look at tagliani because he had been in the same crash and we were sure that he probably had some injuries so we examined him quickly determined there was nothing nothing life-threatening with tag brought him out on a stretcher to go in a second helicopter realized that the first helicopter with alex was still there and i i just i i panicked i didn't panic i just i'm very angry and i went over to the helicopter and i said you know the only german words i knew i grabbed the pilot i pulled him down out of the helicopter and i pointed the sky and schnell schnell by the time zanadi reached hospital he had lost over 72 per cent of his blood volume and had at the most four minutes left to live once stabilized the doctors now turned their attention to the brain damage this massive blood loss may have caused and places a nadi into an induced coma the induced coma was is a method of bringing protection if you can keep the brain quiet in the initial stages of a concussion whether it's a moderate or severe concussion or a really bad head injury it's beneficial and allows the the brain cells to kind of regroup and begin the the healing process after three days zanadi was reanimated daniella alex's wife wanted to be the first one in there when he started to wake up and we were just amazed and and uh so pleased that because when he did wake up uh he recognized daniella and he told her at that time that he'd be okay as long as he had her and his son nowadays it's hoped that improvements in design have almost eradicated the t-bone danger when you have this t-bone accident the survival cell is now so strong that it will resist penetration from the bullet car and what that means is it will tolerate loads in excess of sort of 20 tons and it will remain absolutely intact and all the energy is dissipated into the car that impacted the nose cones fitted to some current formula one car as a very very efficient energy absorber which means if a 401 car hits a brick wall at say 40 miles an hour it the nose cone will absorb all of that energy with no damage to the wall and no damage to the rest of the vehicle alex was back being competitive old alex and i think six months after his injury he was in a hand-controlled go-kart in a world where crashing is an inevitable part of racing the determination amongst injured drivers to return to the racetrack is immense but few have shown such incredible willpower as grand prix motorbike rider mick doing [Music] over the course of his astounding racing career mick dewan won the 500cc world championship a record-breaking five consecutive times however he's also had over 100 crashes i would tell myself at the beginning of the season that i'm probably going to crash twice you know and you know i just hope that i can i won't hurt myself in those a world championship bike weighs 145 kilos and has 240 horsepower from standing still it can travel to kilometers an hour and back to north in just 16 seconds and all that power is controlled by the rider's body weight at close to 200 mile an hour or 320 kilometers which we're exceeding these days the thing only wants to go straight so unless you put a lot of physical energy into it it's not going to go anywhere but straight in every lap the riders spend just 11 seconds seated the rest of the time they're quartering i'm gonna have a huge amount of admiration for motorcycle racers they are doing all sorts of things with with the bike which you know a common man couldn't even contemplate the corners are the most grueling part of the race as the bike pitches over to around 50 degrees the footprint of the tyre on the road changes lessening the grip with the surface with so much horsepower going through the rear wheel the motorcycle being so light generally the front if you wrote it just by using your handlebars the front uh the front tyre would actually slide away and you'd crash so you're not riding the bike with your hands anymore you're actually throwing it with your body weight and through your foot rest in doing this the ride has lowered the center of gravity on the bike now this is where the cornering gets really precarious they spin the rear wheel up to control the slip and the slide of the machine in its trajectory through the corner in the middle of the corner the rider now opens the throttle putting power into the back wheel this should accelerate them out of the turn but just one tiny error and they're in a high side situation [Music] if in sliding that the tire suddenly bites somebody finds grip it will kick the machine [Music] [Applause] whilst high sides are not the most common form of crash they are the most deadly i have seen crashes were realistically at 30 miles an hour on a high side on acceleration coming out of a corner might leap someone 30 30 feet in distance and 10 feet in the air and coming down is a very horrendous situation it's definitely like not like riding down to the to the local grocery store to get a get a bottle of milk to take home to have some coffee with in 1992 mick doohan was on course to win his first ever world championship title in fact journalists were already speculating that with six races left door just needed to win two of them to take the title but then a high sided assen in holland changed everything long story short i crashed the bike landing on top of me i'm sliding down the road at about 110 miles an hour with the bike on top of me i tried to spin myself out from underneath it because it's starting to get a little bit warm not the bike on top of me but the friction running down the road i tried to spin myself out from underneath it everything's spun except for my my leg of course and i i broke my leg duhan had sustained fractures at the base of his right tibia and fibula it wasn't what in medical terms i'd consider a a big injury you know it was just a broken leg [Laughter] mick was fed to the paddocks mobile clinic where he was examined by the championship medic dr costa after the fall i put mixed leg in a cast and it was healing very well and would have healed completely without an operation so i proposed that instead of surgery mick rest and return to the world championship for the second last race hoping that his leg would be strong enough to win dr costa's advice met eight weeks away from the championship but mick knew that with surgery he'd be back on the track twice as fast he was taken off to hospital that afternoon and i think by the next day people were talking about him coming back in a month or you know and he had such a big point to lead that he'd be able to come back and even if he wasn't fully fit when he came back he'd be able to get up to speed and nobody had any doubt that he'd come back and win the title but what was a routine operation brought terrible complications mixed leg muscles swelled up and cut off the blood flow he was rushed back into surgery at once the legs was dying basically and it was actually dying i mean mick said it smelled like a bad butcher's shot i'm sitting in a foreign hospital i don't understand the language i'm i'm not getting much communication from the the staff let alone the doctors he was in constant contact with dr costa who by then was back in italy and when the doctors in holland said well if if we don't sort this out within the next 24 hours we're going to have to amputate it mick obviously got a pretty concern then there were some serious complications i got old on an airplane and flew to holland i practically kidnapped and mick from the hospital and they brought him to italy strange as it may seem the riders they're all so keen to get back you know they're all desperately keen all they want to do is get back that they're quite happy to kind of undergo fairly extreme treatments to get them back on the track and but i think what mick went through was probably more extreme than what anybody's done i just put a total 100 trust into dr costa really and i knew that i wanted to get back there was only one way we were going to achieve that in an intensive operation not for the feeble-minded mixed legs were sewn together [Music] it's not as incredible as one would think i just took all the gangrene parts of the dying leg and attached them to large portions of tissue from the living leg with the dying leg in contact with the living leg the goodness could be shared made life fairly interesting for 16 days as you could imagine and but but you know it was something we had to do and it's you know would i do it again i don't know if i should have dead after that long operation i consoled mick he didn't ask me how the operation went he didn't ask me what had happened he wholly said i want to race and conquer the world championships when he came back to racing at brazil with two or three races left he still couldn't walk he was on crutches and i mean it was green you know his face was green he was that kind of poorly mick was back on the track within six weeks it was an incredible sign of his determination but this level of commitment would come at a price [Music] i felt that faith wasn't fair to mcdewan it wasn't fair to be humiliated like that considering all the risks he took and all the strength that he showed in trying to chase his dream i missed the world championship by four points which was a bit of a you know looking back on it i was very disappointed but also looking back on it i was it was also probably a godsend as well because had i had i won the championship i probably would have stopped instead mick was determined to recover and held his sights on the world championship in what would become a phenomenal comeback mick had to reinvent the way he rode a motorcycle i'd lost the use of my foot but i needed a rear brake so i started riding and taking my thumb off to see to see actually how much i'm using the thing i wasn't using it that much so for the next race we'd modified them we put a rear a thumb activated lever and the rest is history basically but boring boring short story [Music] mech finally became the world champion in 1994 a title which he held for an incredible five consecutive years for me second you've lost you know so second really didn't mean anything to me so winning was what it was all about and getting the most out of out of myself and out of the motorcycle but like so many riders before him mick was finally forced to retire after another devastating crash you don't see people walk away from this sport healthy generally i know too okay two in the last 20 years who've walked away with virtually no serious injury all riders and drivers understand that the price of victories based on the risks they're willing to take there's only two types of oval drivers those that have hit the wall and those who are about but for some it's their death that becomes their legacy oh no something went terribly wrong in motorsport freak injuries will always occur today scientists are working on those which are preventable to this day head injuries are the the number one cause of fatality in all series of motor sports so the head is is kind of loose compared to the torso that's restrained in the car the head and neck are allowed to kind of freely move around in the event of a crash working to prevent disabling injuries the engineers had found ways of better restraining the driver during impact but this had created another problem when you restrain the torso heavily and the head whips there are very high centrifugal forces developed that pull on the head and will either break your neck or break the base of the skull the reason for these high neck loads was eerily simple and it was down to the duration the crash pulse lasts today what we're trying to understand with race car crash data is to try to simulate on our sled the actual crash that the actual race car had because we can reproduce the acceleration now on the sled and we can find out what happened to that driver this 50 kilometer an hour velocity change sled test is comparable to a 200 kilometer an hour [Music] impact when cars crash at these speeds the damage occurs in milliseconds and on our camera these fatal forces are over in just two frames contact at 260. okay go ahead and single frame it to full extension 50 milliseconds by analyzing the crash millisecond by millisecond the engineers can calculate the precise duration of the impact and thus the forces on the head that's it 68 in now let's see him come out keep going the shorter the duration the greater the risk to the driver 135 he hits the bar on the far side so that would be a full rebound sequence about 135 milliseconds with the crash duration faster than the blink of an eye the acceleration of the head is so great that for the crash pulse period the pressure on the head is greater than the weight of this car enough to cause the fatal injury known as a basilar skull fracture what happens in a race crash is the as the torso swings forward and then the tor then the shoulders are restrained and then the head continues to swing forward and there's enough load between the head and neck it actually breaks the base of the skull apart the basilar skull fracture is not a new type of injury it's been around for centuries in the form of judicial hanging but in race cars it was a string of deaths in the nascar stock car series that was to thrust it into the spotlight in the summer of 2000 there were three drivers that were killed uh adam petty from the famous richard kyle petty line he had a right frontal crash basilar skull fracture tony roper kenny irwin similar crashes both died of basilar skull fractures so that in the summer of 2000 it was became clear that there was a problem in stock car racing with basically their skull fracture causing death and then suddenly it sort of dawned on everybody oh that's what's happening everybody sort of began to realize that and then they looked back and said oh this has been going on forever it's a basic cause of death among race drivers in what became a controversial crusade to get stock car drivers to wear head restraints the engineers concluded that the three nascar fatalities would have been prevented had the drivers worn a recently invented restraint system known as the hands device the basic idea of the hans device is to restrain the head to so it directly resists the tendency for it to swing forward and that needs to be done by having loads that go rearward through the middle of the head and then those loads are transmitted down through the collar and the whole thing is restrained with the body by the shoulder harness so when the torso is restrained the hans device restrains the head right along with it [Music] the ford and general motors engineers come here to indianapolis and they plead with the nascar drivers start wearing the hans device it'll save your life and they get almost deaf ears and they find drivers say oh i don't necessarily believe that basil skull fracture stuff who whoever heard of that stuff you know and here's some scientists who is this dr robert hubbard from michigan state you know here's some here's some egghead from some yankee university you know coming down here telling us how to do things and earnhardt was pretty much the the ringleader against it uh he once referred to the hans device as quote that damn noose dale earnhardt was a seven times nascar champion and a legend to stock car fans across the united states but he was a renegade when it came to safety and to many his opinions against the hands epitomised the skepticism of the nascar community his common sense told him if you wore straps around your helmet and you got in a crash it was going to hang you so he referred to the hans as the noose because he thought it was going to kill him rather than save him as soon as i realized that it was practical that it would work at that instant in time i became a fanatic quietly resolved to continue working on this thing until it was used commonly despite the scientific evidence the engineers now provided earnhardt defied any changes in safety he sat right here in indianapolis the august before he died in february and he looked me in the eye and with a lot of people present he said he said i'm comfortable the way i've got my stuff rigged and he said and i have not pulled my brain stem loose and i've hit the wall many times i have not pulled my brain stem loose exactly the words and i looked him back in the eye and my thought was yet the daytona 500 is nascar's legendary race and dale earnhardt has won there many times but as the cars turned to the final bend on february 18 2001 earnhardt was third with his teammate michael waltrip in second and his son dale earnhardt jr leading earnhardt's job was to block the closest challengers namely sterling marling and rusty wallace so here comes rusty wallace flying up the middle totally legal move uh totally legitimate flying up right behind earnhardt well when he got up behind him right before the entrance to turn four the the aerodynamic effect was to rusty's car ran up behind took the took the down force off the rear of earnhardt's car this reconstruction of the accident shows earnhardt's car starting to fishtail as its back end loses grip with the road at this point sterling marlin makes his move earnhardt blocks and loses control [Music] something went terribly wrong this is undoubtedly one of the toughest announcements that i've ever personally had to make but after the accident and turned four at the end of the daytona 500 we've lost dale earnhardt there is still debate about exactly what went on inside the car but what is certain is that the first impact from number 36 veered earnhardt's car into a deadly trajectory angle with the wall racing drivers call this the one o'clock hit because it stops the car immediately well the earnhardt crash is a complicated crash because it was a double hit he was hit on the side and then he hit the wall and the direction of the impact with the wall was such that his head went off to the right and missed the steering wheel because dale's body wasn't well restrained in the in the in the car it developed a larger velocity difference between his torso and the chassis so that when the restraint system finally did hold his body then it was more violent and his course's head was unrestrained and it caused it more violent swinging forward and he had a baseline skull fracture from this restrained torso and restrained head when it happens to superman you know that that's the way that we viewed dale in this sport he was our superman and if it can happen to him sure it can happen to anybody here so we had to kind of at that point in time maybe uh take the bull by the horns and say hey we this is a wake-up call that something we should have been looking at before now that we were a little slow in reacting but i think that we've moved at a very rapid rate since that point in time six months after earnhardt's death the hans device was made compulsory in all nascar races if we would have just sat still and the safety measures wouldn't have gotten better from that point uh then it would have been even more tragic but we haven't we've moved on and i think that they'll be very proud of what he could see with this sport right now we tested the hands device just to see what it would take to destroy it and the results were startling after holding the equivalent of an incredible 160 g for over 500 times the crash pulse period the device finally gave up conceptually there is no limit to the acceleration levels that the hans device will help restrain we'll restrain the guy's head in a crash the hands performance in real race car accidents is startling as well i went head-on into the wall at about 210 miles an hour and so i mean literally i never lifted the throttle trace just went like straight down and at a record impact force of 139 g richie hearn's crash is the accelerometer's highest ever recorded impact the tub crashed he broke his foot no head or neck injuries i didn't have a headache i didn't i didn't black out i didn't nothing i mean i didn't have a mark i didn't have a mark on me except for my foot rich's survival is true testament to the safety devices now implemented in all race cars and a triumph for the scientists and medics who have dedicatedly worked to protect drivers over the last three decades once you start collecting crash data and racing like this you have to keep doing it it's not the kind of thing that well we've learned everything we can learn about it we can stop doing it i think it's now become very obvious to the sanctioning bodies that it's something they're going to be doing for the rest of their active life when you have a a jimmy clark or an arton senna or or dale earnhardt die and it really gets through that that emotional barrier i guess we are all carrying around with us and we think god you know why did i see that before we know we need to do something and something happens and and then we go on to the next plateau but we're in that we're in the next denial stage now we just haven't figured out quite where our next vulnerability is but it's there

Channel: Spark

Views: 1,097,188

Rating: 4.7874594 out of 5

Keywords: Spark, Science, Technology, Engineering, Learning, How To, education, documentary, factual, mind blown, construction, building, full documentary, space documentary, bbc documentary, Science documentary, le mans 55, le mans disaster of 1955 footage, senna, 1994 f1, formula 1 1994, imola 1994, imola, formula 1, worst crashes, racing crashes, motorsport crashes, formula one crashes, ayrton senna, alex zanardi

Id: l-qj6OYbP-I

Length: 47min 44sec (2864 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Icommentoncrap]

Yeah that documentary is trash and has way too many mistakes. Lauda had his wreck at the Nurburgring not Spa, showed Indianapolis motor speedway when talking about Daytona, said Dale Sr won the Daytona 500 "many times", said Dale Jr was leading and won the 500 with Mikey in 2nd. Definitely better documentaries out today than that one