Bob Barnard Track Engineering

I have mentioned before that here in the US motorsport TV commentators are just a mouthpiece for the sport. Promoting the event is usually left to the person staging it, but I guess when the TV is basically paying to keep the sport alive you could argue that they are the promoter.

Yesterday we saw a Las Vegas track with perhaps 25% of the seats filled. Now I expected there to be a very good crowd given the terrible winter most of us have had. The chance of some sunshine in Las Vegas should have been irresistible. The economy is getting better, so having a holiday and watching the race should be a no brainer for an east coast "good "ol boy."

So, when we hear Mike Joy tell us that the promoter has said "the place is packed" while seeing a shot of sparsely filled seats in the main grandstand is ridiculous. Either Joy is a fool, or is prostituting himself for Fox. Lost my respect.

As is becoming the pattern this year the race was won on the last lap, if not the last corner. People have said for a long time they watch the start and the last 20 laps. Now they do not even need to do that. Sure we all like a close race, but this is a brief moment of excitement in a 2 to 3 hour race.

Note to the Fox Director, stay away from overhead shots, it is too easy to count the fans.

The events of the last couple of weeks have given me pause to reflect on how life and death are flip sides of the same coin, and how often whether people survive or die an incident is based on how the flip of that coin goes. We are mortal and will die, although I have seen too many people in racing who think they are immortal!

We see Dan Wheldon die in an accident we have seen many times before with results ranging from drivers walking away to fatalities. Mike Conway's accident at Indy kept him out of racing for a year, but he recovered from what looked a similar incident. Indeed, I think 15 cars were involved at Las Vegas, and most of the drivers walked. Talking of the number of cars, much has been made of 34 cars on a 1.5 mile track. Tune in this weekend to watch NASCAR run 43 cars on a half mile paper clip oval. Any comment Jimmie Johnson?

We see Marco Simoncelli die in a simple get off that he and many others have had over the years. Kevin Schwantz at Phillip Island two years in a row! Marco was just in the wrong place this time, as was the Moto2 rider a year or so ago.

While we were mourning these two great competitors three others from off-road racing died in a plane crash. How many times have we seen this with sportsmen, especially motorsport, rushing from one event to another? Rick Hendrick's great loss of a few years ago, Graham Hill, former F1 Champion killed after he stopped racing, and David Coulthard walking away from a fatal crash where the pilots died. I see a great friend, Skip Jackson, Australian Sprint Car Champion and Knoxville fan favorite, be diagnosed with an aggressive prostate cancer at the age of 42, after a purely fortuitous blood test, and survive. Chance. Then there is that great Austrlian driver, Peter "Perfect" Brock who died after retiring in a fun rally driving a replica Cobra Coupe built by his American namesake. What were the odds of that?

So where does falibility come in. Everything we do involves us humans, and we are all falible. When I see a fatal crash I think of the tracks I've built or approved and think "there but for the grace of God go I." As I have said in presentations on track design, we are becoming over-reliant on simulation and computers, and too clever for our own good as a result. As it happens I received my monthly copy of the Engineers Australia magazine yesterday, and there are three articles related to this. One is from a forensic accident investigator who writes, "No matter how hard we try to prevent these events, they will still happen because we are all human and errors will occur despite our best efforts." He goes on to say "New processes and materials are constantly arriving on the market, and the uses to which they are put constantly changes. What doesn't change seems to be the human factor. Insurance records historically show that about 50% of all accidents are directly related to human error and that figure has hardly changed over the years."

In the same magazine is a report of the brand new grandstand in Wollongong, yes there is such a place, being damage by high winds. This is the structure we are talking of, not the roof panels. How does that happen in this day of computer analysis? At college in the mid-sixties we had to analyse by hand and slide rule the new cantilever grandstand roof at the Sheffield Wednesday soccer ground. This obviously had been originally designed a few years earlier just the same way, but still stands to this day without incident.

So to sum up. I have been known to say that track design is more art than science. One of my favorite engineering sayings is "it's more art than science, but at least we are doing the art more scientifically these days." The following quote is also from the Engineers magazine, and I wish I had know it earlier. It is a 1960's definition of structural engineering, but I think you will see the message."Structural Engineering is the art of moulding materials we do not wholly understand into shapes we cannot precisely analyse, so as to withstand forces we cannot really assess, in such a way that the community at large has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance." Touche.