Closed cockpit Indy car

[Park Lane Yido]

I don't know how many people have see what is flying round twitter the past 24h but some guy has come out with a design for a closed cockpit for an Indy car: indycar_close_cockpit-02 | Flickr - Photo Sharing!



Before I saw that pic I didn't like the idea one little bit. But I must admit that it is sexy as anything.

There's even been Indy drivers saying this looks fantastic. And Graham Rahal has urged the chassis maker (Dallara) to employ the designer!!

[Luke0405]

Looks great, and if it can save lives then I'm all for the sport changing.

[edmonds44]

if the cars on fire though would it be easy to get out of? i thought they had to be able to escape the car within a certain time frame... and adding a roof would delay that time?

looks nice though

[belondon]

what does it solve? a bar or cover over the drivers head and sides would do the same and let the driver out and track-doctors access better/quicker/easier.


The cockpit design appears to have corners in it. meaning very poor vision. You need to have a Fighter-Jet style bubble. the material is another hard one to think is do-able.

There are better solutions. but agree this is a bery sexy looking car and i would love to see it work. but i would miss the open cockpit of today.

[Park Lane Yido]

if the cars on fire though would it be easy to get out of? i thought they had to be able to escape the car within a certain time frame... and adding a roof would delay that time?

With a fire the Indy drivers who have commented on it so far say it would help driver safety as burn injuries mainly occur from fire coming into the cockpit from the outside. This would provide a barrier.

The canopy could be held in place with some kind of quick release.

Indy have looked at a dragster style roll cage for 2012. But this may not help where there is a lot of debris like the crash the other week, it would make no difference for fire, it'd be harder for a quick release, the cockpit would be wider to fit the cage, it may make things like Massa's incident when he was hit by a spring worse (for it could deflect objects towards a drivers face when they would have just clipped the helmet).

A few months ago F1 fired a wheel and tyre at an F16 canopy!