Photo: Joe Portlock / LAT Images / FIA F2 Championship
The FIA, motorsport’s global governing body, has detailed several safety-based changes that could be introduced to junior single-seaters.
The recommended changes follow ‘investigations of 28 serious and fatal accidents’ that occurred during 2019.
One area of investigation, with the aim of reducing the loss of bodywork that then becomes highly dangerous debris, is tethering for structurally significant parts of the car, as is already compulsory with wheels.
For smaller areas of bodywork, alternative composite material construction is being eyed as a way of reducing the chance of it being shed in an incident.
Work on the front wing, the bodywork component most likely to be lost in an impact, could lead to it becoming a “controlled failure” area of the car, where it is designed by regulation to dissipate energy through impact by ‘deliberately’ losing the impacting areas such as the endplates. Deliberate design failures such as this would reduce the stress load across the full front wing assembly and therefore reduce the chance of a larger failure.
Frontal impact structures will be improved in Formula 2 and FIA Formula 3 Championship prior to the next generation cars coming into use, and bring the two series in line with Formula 1, the second generation FIA Formula 4 cars and Euroformula’s new Dallara 320 car in safety standard.
Work on side impact structures is also being done by the FIA that could be applied to existing car designs.
Other safety features under consideration include electronic response systems and tyre pressure monitoring technology that’s already been introduced to F2 and FIA F3 since Anthoine Hubert’s fatal crash last year.