The electric sidecar went home because she couldn't ride it. Got lost on course and headed for the timing tower.
The gusset rule was put into place because a lakester driver flipped at El Mirage and while upside down the cage was ripped from the car, driver decapitated.
Thanks for your input,
DW
General thought, not MC streamliner specific:
One thing that always puzzled me. How do racers get the inside scoop on failure analysis? People who are building a car/bike need to know this kind of information before, during, and after construction. Since some of the req's aren't always relevant to a given model, you need to know where to spend the money/time where it will do the most good. If rule X has never caused a death, but rule Y has, then move money/time from X to Y. We build to what we experience as risks based the crashes we know of. So some stuff is not SCTA req'd but is absolutely critical for the application to be safe. This will get some people angry, but there are some SCTA "safety" items that decrease the survivability on certain projects.
This is probably why some rules seem odd to outsiders like myself. We can't tell what is critical. When we get squawked in tech, we have no idea how important that rule is, if our vehicle doesn't need that feature that was squawked. ie - Traction Bar Straps that do nothing, since both ends are already 100% captive and cannot come off or drop down even if the bar breaks in two. They must be there, but we know they could not do anything, other than the "safety" strap fall off on the track. Yes, I've picked up nuts and u-bolts that were probably off the traction/suspension straps during course walks.
Did the lakester in question have a cage or a halo? They are not the same thing. A coupe cage has an outside skin, often steel on production projects, often with a cage structure integrated from the factory, and a lot more triangle in it. There isn't just a few bars like a halo, nor can they touch the ground in many cases without a complete failure of the entire body and frame.
Why did the car flip is also important; blown tire, too low, spin, driver error, chassis failure, etc? Better to fix what causes things to crash, than to attempt to make a car crash-resistant. You can never make a car crash survivable. You can only reduce the risk. The #1 thing to reduce risk is to keep the car under driver control.
Nobody wants to crash, get injured or die. So if there is information out there about failures, we stand a better chance. Again, it will get people mad, but keeping the info private increases risk and is very, very dangerous.