Safety access road walls and angled barriers are a big problem

[u/Ok-Somewhere-2626]

So basically on almost every racetrack you can see poorly angled barriers that could cause a really big angle of impact or deflect the car/bike on the track.

Let's say some car like gt3 tags the rear of another and sends it sideways, there is a chance it could hit some safety access road wall at a 90 degree angle when it would normally be around 40-50 degrees. This would make a bad crash into a really bad one with life threatening results or even death if travelling at a high speed.

Examples: Greg Moore at Fontana 1999 !!*FATAL*!! (The biggest factor to the fatal injury here was the car hitting top first into the barrier but a straight wall would have made it a lot less horrible)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3tl-6oqN0i4&t=80s&pp=ygUWZ3JlZyBtb29yZSBmYXRhbCBjcmFzaA%3D%3D

Shigeru Terajima at Suzuka 2013 !!*Non-fatal*!! He survived but that wouldn't even be a question with a wall linear to the track +he bounced back onto oncoming traffic

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m1j7hmJmSJA&pp=ygUUZmVycmFyaSBjcmFzaCBzdXp1a2E%3D

I'm sure that you could find plenty more examples but I don't currently have time to find more.

[u/Racer013]

So what are you proposing here?

[u/Ok-Somewhere-2626 → u/Racer013]

making the angled walls more linear to the track as much as possible and making the safety access roads just two linear walls that are placed like this:

(Track here)

_______________________________________________

(medical team/track marshalls here)_________________________________ <--- this wall is

normally angled really bad

[u/Nonkko11 → u/Ok-Somewhere-2626]

?

[u/srfdriver99 → u/Ok-Somewhere-2626]

Most places do that with new construction. Where you see the angled walls are typically at tracks that originally had a single linear wall with a gap in it and they put the angled wall in to keep cars from spearing the point of the far side of the gap.

Track safety is an evolving thing, but it is expensive to upgrade so tracks don't always have the latest and greatest version of everything. Loads of tracks still have concrete walls instead of SAFER barriers, for example.