F1 barriers: Low-tech innovation in a hi-tech world

For a sport in which cars can hurtle off a track at 200mph, the pace of innovation in barrier technology has been slow, to say the least, in F1.

That’s not to say there haven’t been changes over the years but, compared with other aspects of the sport, developments in barrier technology have moved at a glacial pace.

Having said that, trackside safety now is immeasurably superior to safety just a generation or two ago. So what’s changed?

Any protection is good protection?

Look back at photographs from the inaugural F1 race, at Silverstone in 1950, and you’ll see just how far track safety has come since then.

Despite there being 120,000 spectators, nothing more substantial than hay bales is present to keep cars and crowds apart.

Some rope shows spectators how close they can get to the track – very close in places – and there are even tall tubs holding flowers visible on parts of the trackside. Six years later (pictured) and protection remains minimal – and there are still potted conifers just off the track, because a pretty track is more important than a safe track.

F1 was an extremely high-risk sport – for fans as well as drivers.

Those hay bales were not just inadequate, they were potentially lethal, but they’d remain a feature of F1 until 1967.

At that year’s Monaco Grand Prix, Italian driver Lorenzo Bandini crashed out of second place at the harbour chicane.

His Ferrari overturned, spilling fuel everywhere, and slid into straw bales – which promptly ignited too.

Bandini was appallingly burned in the accident, but was eventually pulled alive from the smoking wreckage. So bad were his injuries that he begged doctors to let him die, but he survived for three days before finally succumbing to his burns.

Straw bales were banned in F1, but the death toll would keep on rising.

Railway sleepers, embankments and concrete retaining walls were used to keep crashing cars out of the crowds but they offered no real protection to drivers – seatbelts were not compulsory and many racers preferred to be thrown from a car rather than be trapped and burn to death, even if they’d be travelling faster than a free-falling skydiver when they were ejected.

Something had to change and, slowly, the sport started to take safety a little more seriously.

The age of Armco

We still see Armco barriers at race tracks and, indeed, along every major road in the country.

But the introduction of Armco to motorsport was nothing to do with the Armco company and, indeed, it was somewhat surprised to hear Jackie Stewart talking enthusiastically about how famous its products were.

Armco wasn’t ever a name for the familiar barriers – it simply stood for the American Rolling Mill Company, which was set up to produce sheet iron and steel.

As innovative as Armco barriers were to the world of F1, they weren’t even invented by Armco.

The original ‘Armco’ barrier was called the Flex-Beam guard rail, and it was introduced by the Sheffield Steel Corporation of Kansas back in 1933, shortly before Armco took them over.

The beauty of these barriers was their simplicity – it was a straightforward two-stage process to manufacture them from mild steel.

Firstly, bolt-holes were punched in the steel strips, and then they were pressed into the W-shape that we are all so familiar with.

In 1969, the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association recommended that barriers be installed around Barcelona’s Montjuïc street circuit.

Some £25,000 was spent installing barriers and they immediately helped save the lives of the Lotus drivers Graham Hill and Jochen Rindt, whose experimental rear wings both broke at high speed.

However, crash barriers weren’t universally popular. Their principal function was to keep spectators safe – cars of this era weren’t designed with the complex crush zones of modern F1 cars, and some drivers realised the barriers might actually make things worse for them in an accident.

And Armco barriers aren’t that easy to repair – they don’t regain their shape after an impact and replacing them is no small job.

In the early 1970s, poorly-installed Armcos claimed several lives. The picture (above) shows Colin Chapman and Ronnie Peterson sitting on an Armco after hearing that Austrian driver Helmuth Koinigg had been decapitated when his car buckled the lower section of a barrier, and continued on under the upper section.

Tread carefully

In some ways, the next innovation in barrier safety can seem like a step backwards – using old tyres to cushion the impact in a crash.

Simple tyre walls appeared during the 1970s and proved very effective at dissipating the energy in a crash.

Over the years since, the rules governing tyre barriers have become more complex. Tyre stacks were made mandatory at F1 tracks in 1981 and they remain a core part of trackside safety to this day.

It’s not just a case of tying old tyres together with some rope.

Tyre barriers must be at least as high as the retaining wall behind them and the tyres are all bolted together.

Several tyre layers will be bolted to each other to give increased protection, and the whole structure is enclosed in a thick rubber ‘conveyor belt’ along which cars can slide if they impact at an angle, rather than snagging on tyres.

Inside the tyre ‘towers’, energy-absorbing polypropylene inserts are placed to absorb even more kinetic energy in a crash. These are cylinders, approximately 1m tall and, at most, 32.5cm in diameter.

Testing times

After Ayrton Senna was killed at Imola, in 1994, the FIA commissioned Britain’s Transport Research Laboratory to develop a test that would evaluate the effectiveness of existing and new barrier types in impacts with sharp-nosed single-seater vehicles.

The TRS came up with a 780kg trolley, fitted with a replaceable F3000 nose.

Among the barrier options tested were different ways of attaching the tyres (straps and bolts), different sorts of inserts in the tyres, placing smaller tyres inside larger tyres to increase mass, attaching a ‘conveyor belt’ to the tyre wall and separating the front two rows of a tyre wall from the rear row.

They found that something as simple as using plastic inserts, not dissimilar to mains gas piping, doubled the amount of kinetic energy absorbed by the barriers.

One of the great advantages of tyre walls is that there is no shortage of construction material – the US Environmental Protection Agency estimated that around 290million tyres are thrown away every year just in the US, and that some 56million of these are reused in civil engineering projects, including crash barriers at race tracks.

Tyre walls have some drawbacks – ‘submarining’, when a car embeds itself under the wall, is a concern and, in warmer countries, mosquitoes can breed in the rainwater trapped in tyre towers.

Going pro

In recent years, more advanced barrier solutions have appeared in motorsports, such as the SAFER and Tecpro solutions.

Tecpro barriers (pictured), which first established themselves in the karting world, have become a familiar sight at F1 circuits.

The Tecpro system uses a mixture of reinforced plastic blocks and impact-absorbing blocks in a series of different combinations, depending on where on a track the barriers are placed.

The impact-absorbing blocks (red coloured) are made of flexible polyethylene, are 1.2m tall and weigh 45kg.

Reinforced blocks are grey, and constructed from high-strength polyethylene, with a metal sheet at their core and three nylon straps to connect them to one another.

A low-risk part of a circuit might have just a single row of reinforced blocks, separated from an Armco barrier or concrete wall by impact-absorbing blocks.

In contrast, a high-speed corner might require two rows of reinforced blocks with several layers of impact-absorbing blocks.

Tecpro claim that fitting a 1km stretch of Tecpro barrier would take a four-person team 15 days, while installing tyre walls would require an eight-person team, working for 53 days.

They also say it takes just four technicians to repair a Tecpro barrier after a big crash – a tyre wall could take 20 people to put back together in a reasonable time.

From a maintenance perspective, the Tecpro barriers are attractive because they’re easy to clean, people don’t hide litter in them and – this is a genuine concern in many countries – pests such as snakes don’t hide in them.

You really don’t want to survive a high-speed crash only to find a couple of poisonous, angry serpents have been flipped into your cockpit.

These barriers first appeared in F1 at the 2006 Italian Grand Prix, with the FIA saying they could withstand a 210-220km/h impact.

These days, you’ll see them everywhere. They’re not perfect – at Sochi in 2015, the Toro Rosso of Carlos Sainz slid under a Tecpro barrier at speed, burying his car, forcing the Tecpro cells over an Armco barrier and destroying the Armco barrier with the nose of his car.

But they’ve been a welcome addition to track safety, a genuine innovation in an area of F1 that has lacked new ideas over the decades.