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Its common practice to bring up drivers safety week in week out but after the death of a spectator at the Nordschleife, maybe its time to bring in to question the safety of the fans.
Tyre walls and fences aren't always enough and much credit has to go to the Marshalls who sit nearby when the cars/bikes are mere inches away.
Any ideas on the issue?
Mine is to if possible at least make a minimum distance that the fans need to be so that they aren't in the line of fire.
Not a bad idea, you might think.. but how far is that..?
You'd have to sit the fans further away for GT races compared to BTCC races, and even further for F1/WEC etc as the cars travel at different speeds. At the Nordschleife in particular there is limited or no scope for alterations as there is protected land & planning issues. The same is true of many, many other older circuits (Monza, Brands Hatch, Imola, etc). Unfortunately, spectators will never be safe, but there are better ways to look to make them/us safer than moving everyone further & further back from the tracks. Even then, a spectator killed at Donington in 1990 was alongside Starkey's straight & an accident in British F3000 sent a car over the wall into spectators. Similarly EJ Viso in 2007 at Magny-Cours(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx5E2yprEcU). Marco Campos was killed in near-identical fashion after contact with another car tyre-to-tyre on a straight at Magny-Cours.
Spectating at motorsport events will never be safe, and we all need to realise that and understand and accept this.
One point of note in the Mardenborough / Nordschleife incident is that some spectators had climbed over one fence to be closer to the track. This is a common and unofficially accepted practice at the
Nordschleife. I don't know whether those hit by the car were in this area only, or in the official spectator enclosure.
As you may have seen in St Petersburg at the opening Indycar race, a fan was hit by a piece of debris while several metres behind a grandstand, which itself was several metres from the track. How far can you go?
To my mind, the main issue is barriers; specifically tyre barriers. These are made of rubber which in & of itself is elastic & although it dissipates some energy from an impact, much of the energy is reflected & redirected back to the car.
There have been several occasion in the past few years where cars have been launched over tyre barriers, sometimes into spectator areas, sometimes not. This is more of the problems as I see it in terms of preventing cars & parts, where possible from ending up in sopectator areas.
Allan McNish's LMP1 car at Le Mans 2011 bounced off a tyre wall & finished up in the access road/photographer's enclosure. Over/through the catch-fencing.
Tomas Enge's Lamborghini GT3 barrel-rolled almost over a barrier after hitting the tyres at Slovakiaring.
Gunther Schaldach's GT-D Camaro cleared the catch-fence at Road America in 2009, bouncing over a tyre wall.
Jason Bright (V8 Supercar) ended up flipping his car into the air on top of a tyre wall & into the catch-fence in Adelaide 2014.
Eduardo Cisneros (GT Porsche) was launched (off uneven grass) onto a tyre wall & bounced along it landing almost on top of a marshal's post at VIR in 2013. Marco Holzer in the same incident bounced out of the tyres & back onto the track.
Allan McNish in F1 vaulted a tyre barrier at Suzuka in 2002.
Gonzalo Rodriguez (Indycar) was also vaulted over a catch fence & wall in his fatal acccident at Laguna Seca in 1999.
Hitoshi Ogawa (Japanese F3000) at Suzuka in 1992.
This shows it is not only in take-off events where cars launch over walls, and this list is only in respect of tyre walls. There have been others where others barriers have been cleared, but these are fewer.
The list also shows that it happens with a variety of cars and tracks.
The number of cars that get bounced back onto the track from tyre walls & into the path of other vehicles is also alarming. With concrete walls/barriers cars will bounce back into tracks at some point, but it's worth noting that the occasions in which drivers have been killed or injured feature many examples where a car has been flung back into the path of oncoming traffic. Tyre barriers make this more likely even when cars run far off track. I'm not saying concrete & armco barriers are safe, but simply that tyres in front of them are not the only solution.
We used to think hay bales were safe, now I think it's time for a re-think on rubber cylinder stacks.
Sprint cars and open-wheel cars (e.g Indycar) feature high probability of flying car accidents caused by tyre-to-tyre contact and a lot of effort has been put into implementing bumper bars to stop this. It's not a coincidence.
Looking into an alternative should be a priority - though at a circuit like the Nordschleife cost of such a solution may be prohibitively expensive.
A setup like SAFER barriers, or perhaps Tecpro barriers with an additional airfence may serve. The airfences as used in MotoGP wouldn't work immediately; they would need to be used at higher pressure for the larger mass of cars, but SAFER barriers have proven to be very effective at many tracks, not solely on ovals, even in direct collisions. (There is not one SAFER barrier - the polystyrene blocks are spaced, angled and sized differently for different uses) The major issue on a longer track will be cost, which may be prohibitive (what price safety, as always?)
An exacerbating factor in the Mardenborough crash was the fact that the car got airborne, but it did not leave the ground totally and had either it not lifted or not hit a tyre barrier it's likely the results would have been different, so the lifting also needs to be looked at; however, it's more common that cars are taking off & ending up in spectator areas from contact with tyre walls than through lifting off.
My suggestion would be to look into implementing a form of cowl flap (similar to NASCAR) which vents air from beneath the car if the pressure differential (which is what causes the lift) gets above a certain level. This has been seen to happen as 'slow' as 120 mph, even in cars producing significant downforce if there is as little as a 5 degree angle between track and car floor.
There is a lot of data available in terms of CFD work and windtunnel (plus real-world data) from the NASCAR R&D centre which could be used as a starting point. The info & details for GT3 are held centrally & in Europe aren't manufacturer-aligned (by rule) so getting lift coefficients for each car is definitely possible; which would assist driver and spectator/marshal safety if the lift-off can be prevented. NASCAR gets a lot of criticism for being technologically 'backward' but with GT3 as an example of cars which are raced worldwide, and this incident occurring with a GT3 car, it's a good starting point, and there's no reason for the FIA, or SRO, or DMSB to start from scratch when lessons learned with one form of rapid 3-box car with front, rear & top-surface downforce-generators can't be applied to others. Collaboration is the key, not closed-mindedness at a time like this.
This, plus barrier improvements (get rid of bouncy barriers) should improve car and track safety for everyone. It's not going to be an instant process, but it's a good start.