darnall (Offline)
#19
1/13/14 6:51 PM
The halo bars over head on a sprint or midget cage have worried me since I saw the 1st one, and Tony Beaber had a wreck during hotlaps of the BOSS finale at Eldora that kind of proved my point... as the cage is typically built, should the car land cage down or cage into fence, the load from that hit is spread over an area 2 foot wide by 3 foot long, with vertical support at each corner.... When you add that halo bar over the drivers head, and it hits the ground or the fence, all that force is being concentrated on a 2 square inch area on each side of the cage that has no vertical support underneath it...a hit to the halo will buckle the horizontal front to back bars on the cage right where the halo mounts.. Tony builds a great car...his work has nothing to do with the way this buckled....pure physics here... I stole these pics off his FB page to demonstrate my point, and I think credit for 2 of them belongs to J and T Photos..
The first pic shows the beginning of the crash, second pic is part way through the crash and you can see that the hit to the top has compromised the front to rear horizontal bars... 3rd pic is from back in the shop with the body panels removed..
We have no way to know if this hit would have buckled the cage if the halo had not been on it, but it is pretty clear to me that the halo concentrated all that force into a part of the cage with no vertical support..
However...imagine that another car hit the top of the cage and caused similar damage...even with the cage collapsed the way it is the halo bar is still sitting as high or higher above the drivers head than a standard cage sits under normal conditions, which would lead you to think it would still protect you from c0kp1t intrusion better than a car without a halo...the question is how many more hits need to be taken after the structure of the cage gets compromised before there is no protection.
Again, this is an extremely well built car. I currently am driving a Beaberbuilt car and I have 100% confidence in the quality of welding and material selection. There isn't a sprintcar in the world that would have taken this hit and not caved the cage if it had a similar halo bar.