Oh I agree you can not plan for everything, however keep inmind that until 12 years ago on the fateful day no one wore a head and neck restraint either. So there is always room for improvment....

What worries me more than anything, is after turning turtle, there you are on your side, with the open top of the cage waiting for someone out of the pack, driving in the top, but I've been told that it is a no no to try to protect that area, for safety, so they can get you out easier, but WTH, they cut the cage off anyway, someone isn't seeing something here. I've seen some with some protection just over the back of the cockpit, but even then, you're liable to get yelled at for doing it. No win situation. Bob

Kyle Cummins has some sort of bar on top of his roll cage above the driver. Good idea in my opinion. We need more protection for our drivers....it seems we have had alot of drivers get hurt this year, more than normal .....

Steve Morin

That doesn't really make the cage stronger, the intent is to keep the cows out, I wanted to install one on my car, and was told it would make the car unsafe, and more than necessary difficult to get the driver out if needed, if the car is damaged that bad, and they are concerned about the driver, they cut the cage off anyway, so why is it unsafe. If need be, they can unbolt the seat, and tip it forward to make it easier, or just take the "package" out as an assembly, driver and seat. If the tube that crosses the cage has 90 degree bends on each end, and no more than 1 tube diameter long, I fail to understand how it could spread the cage, and make it collapse. JMHO! Bob

I race a wingless in Australia and we run a head protection bar that is welded or clamped
to top of chassis. the clamp on design is a good idea all you need is a spanner and you can remove
it for winged or in-case the driver needs to be removed. also have seen a bar welded vertical from bottom rail to top of cage at front. remember triangles are strong

The big problem that I see - structurally - is the front upright that connects to the down tubes.
They are just hanging out there with no triangulation and no tie ins or supports to the down tube itself.
Asking that one tube, that is typically already bent back at 5-15 degrees, to take the brunt of ANY impact is Russian roulette at best.
Does it work for now?
Possibly.
Cage less cars worked for decades too....

I rolled mine on the stock cage it bent it in multiple places and i had to replace the whole cage. Im not sure about making it stronger i know some people weld their own custom cages but that seems like it would be a lot of work....

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.

Darnall, that was the whole intent of my post, not as an addition of support strength to the cage, but just to add that bit of protection to the top of the driver, like I sad, "keep the cows out", or at least deflect the blow to the helmet, that is a mighty big opening, and in some cases, things happen real quick, and that at least would provide something other than the helmet to keep another car out of the cockpit, I've had tires run over my shoulders, front wheels stuck over the side bars, and no problem, but a hit on the open cage might not be so pleasant, that was the sole intent of me wanting to add it, if the crash is bad enough, they will cut the cage off anyway, so what makes the difference, sometimes they will, just to practice! Thanks! Bob