From 2019, the FIA will mandate a new safety standard with regards to helmet design in
F1. The new design and specification is the result of a decade of research and will make
for the safest, most literally bulletproof helmet used in motorsport.
But we get ahead of ourselves. Let’s look back at how we got to today’s pretty incredible
helmet standards from way back before scientists had even invented colour.
Before F1, when the very idea of safety was laughed out of the paddock, racing drivers
would fly around the track, very much exposed with nothing to protect their heads but a
pair of goggles and a cloth cap. The goggles, of course, kept the dust, grit
and oil out of their eyes. and the cloth - or sometimes leather - cap was mainly used for
keeping warm from the chill of fast moving air.
Sometimes primitive visors were attached to the peak of this headgear for those that preferred
slightly less constrictive eyewear. To be fair - at the time, there weren’t
that mainly solutions available and, honestly, the fact that it might be a good idea to more
substantially protect your head when racing hadn’t really caught on. Fast cars were
a fairly new concept. The first somewhat protective helmets, becoming
commonly used in the 1940s and mandated-ish in the 50s were little more than polo helmets.
These were basically hard hats, the structure of which was formed from sheets of cotton
layered together and soaked in resin to form a hard shell. These often sat like a builders
hat or soldiers helmet, above the ear, so the cloth caps persisted underneath.
It wasn’t until 1954 that the first mass produced helmet became available. Produced
by Bell, the 500 TX extended the shape of the hard shell (now made of a fibreglass laminate)
further down to cover the sides and base of the head. They were also properly padded,
which we’ll get to later. These helmets were the most effective designs
of their time and the first to be safety certified by Snell.
The Snell Foundation was set up in 1957 following the death by head injury of Pete Snell in
a motor race. From then until now, Snell has been at the forefront of research and development
in helmet protection as well as providing recognised safety standards for helmets in
motorsport and transit across the world. F1 now uses FIA standards in helmets, but until
2015, Snell was still the reference point. Now you may notice the Bell 500 design has
a big gaping hole across most of the face - an area you might consider worth protecting.
Though cloth and leather scarves, skirts and face masks had been used for many years in
order to keep dirt and debris from striking the face or getting in the mouth, it wasn’t
until 1968 that a full face helmet was used in F1.
It’s design was adapted from those used by dirt bikers, who were very much at the
forefront trying not to swallow an unhealthy dose of dirt and stones.
Naturally this helmet was immediately ridiculed, as all safety developments that come with
an aesthetic change usual are [COUGH]. But, in the coming years it would become the new
standard among drivers in F1, shielding from debris and protecting the chin and jaw when
striking the steering wheel or chassis in an accident.
Now, up until relatively recently, the risk of fire was very much a life and death reality.
The head needed to be protected as much as any part of the body and as such you didn’t
want the helmets to catch fire - particularly the lining and padding.
In 1968, during the boom of synthetic materials, Nomex was introduced into the lining and padding
of the helmet. Nomex is an artificial fibre than can be woven into a fabric. It’s brilliance
lies in the fact that it doesn’t burn readily so will extinguish as soon as it’s removed
from a fire and is has a very low heat conductivity. This meant that heat from a fire will not
travel easily through Nomex material so the helmet can be exposed to some pretty significant
flames while the head inside will take a long while to feel anything more than a Norwegian
sauna. Now while a helmet didn’t cover every inch
of the head, this was a significant step up. The 70s saw the prevalence of flip up visors
designed into the helmet itself, though in their early years there was no particular
standard for this and a variety of interesting designs were seen on display.
It wasn’t until much later that the visor itself would become an integral part of keeping
the driver safe. So, by the end of the 1970s, the basic helmet
(at least superficially) had developed pretty much to design we recognise today: full, hard
head coverage, with a letterbox for the eyes and a detachable flip up visor. Development
and refinement focussed on improving the ability of the helmet to resist impact, deformation
and related injurious effects. Testing standards and crash tests were continually
improved by organisations like Snell and the FIA, bringing us the helmets used today in
Formula 1 - the current highest standard of motor racing helmet in the world.
So let’s examine today’s helmet. The exact structure of the helmet’s hard
shell varies between manufacturers but essentially the material is laminar (meaning it’s made
of thin layers) and includes in its make up various carbon composites and metals, carbon
fibre for structural strength, and Kevlar. Now Kevlar, a synthetic fabric, is useful
in two ways - firstly it’s very fire resistant (similar to Nomex in this regards) Secondly
its strong, tightly woven structure makes it incredibly resistant to penetration from
projectiles or sharp objects. The fibres are so strongly interwoven that it’s incredibly
hard to separate them, which is why it’s also used in bullet and knife-proof vests.
And while it’s all well and good having the hard part of the helmet stop projectiles
and keep heavy impacts from crushing the head inside, if the impact causes a sudden heavy
movement to the head (even if the head itself is not injured) your brain can still be kicked
around in your skull causing a massive amount of damage.
See, your brain is a sort of pudding like structure and brain damage tends to come from
massive acceleration whipping the brain around inside the head which can sever or damage
connections in the brain. It’s kind of like if you had a can of alphabetti
spaghetti that was arranged in perfect alphabetical order inside the can. If you shook the can
up, you’d mess up the order of the alphabetti spaghetti inside, even if the can itself if
perfectly pristine on the outside. Such is the tricky business of protecting
the brain. The goal, as in almost all motor sport safety
features, is to reduce the acceleration in accidents. In this case - the acceleration
of the head and, by reaction, the brain. So this is where the padding comes in - the
idea of it being to provide room for the head to crash into, deforming to absorb the energy
of the accelerating helmet and reducing the acceleration imparted to the head.
So if the helmet is struck, the hard outer part of the helmet will accelerate more strongly
than the head inside as the padding is specifically strong enough to resist accelerating the head,
dampening the energy into the its foam structure. This is very similar to the way tyre barriers,
for example, deform to absorb the energy of a crashing car, thereby reducing its sudden
deceleration. You may also notice that modern helmet might
also have a bit more sculpting or attached fairings to it than just being a big smooth
ball. This is to help with aerodynamics, and not just for the car’s sake.
With the introduction of the Halo, this has become less of an issue, but a driver’s
head poking out of the cockpit right smack in the middle of the airflow provides something
of an aerodynamic challenge. Adding some sculpting to the shape of the helmet that allows the
air to flow more efficiently around it can significantly reduce the power deficit that
a regular helmet induces via drag. Not only that, by smoothing out the air around
the helmet we can reduce the turbulent air that can not only rattle the helmet quite
severely, but even lift the helmet, sucking it upwards, which is dangerous and puts pressure
on the throat. Today’s visor continues to shield against
dirt and bugs and can be made in different tints for different lighting conditions.
It includes several layers of tear offs, which are sticky membranes very similar to phone
screen protectors that can be literally torn off and thrown away one by one as they become
dirty through a session. But there’s a lot more to the modern visor.
It also acts as a defensive layer against projectiles that may penetrate the gaping
hole in the middle of the helmet. The visor is made of a clear polycarbonate material
that is strong and flame resistant, able to absorb energy through deformation when struck
and pretty good at resisting penetration. -
In the wake of an accident in which Felipe Massa was struck in the face with a spring
at 270 km/h, a Zylon strip was added to the visor for extra protection. Straddling the
top edge of the helmet, Zylon is stronger at absorbing impact energy than carbon fibre
so it provides a large area around the most vulnerable part of the helmet to protect the
driver from small projectiles, the likes of which Massa experienced.
So 2019 then. Enter the new high standard in helmet design.
Now, firstly it’s important to note that this isn’t actually a specific helmet, more
a set of standards and parameters around which helmet manufacturers are expected to produce
helmets. So Bell, Schuberth, Arai, etc are all expected to produce their own models to
fit this specification. The most noticeable difference here is the
narrower letterbox through which the drivers see. It may look a little sight restrictive
but there have been historical helmets there were way harder to see out of and the Zylon
strip used in recent year actually comes down further than the letterbox will in 2019.
In fact, the reason the top of the letterbox has been shifted downwards for the new helmet
is because the protection provided by the Zylon strip has been incorporated into the
helmet’s main body. The FIA have worked up a new, stricter standard
of tests that a homologated helmet must withstand having spent years working with all major
helmet manufacturers on being able to produce helmets capable of surviving such strict challenges.
You can see from these standards that the deceleration of the head inside the helmet
is specifically measured in the impact tests. There is also now more specific tests for
penetration from high speed debris (or “ballistics”) and a specific check on the visor itself being
able to withstand small, pellet like debris at high speed.
With the liveries, sponsorship and visors finalised for each driver, it’s unlikely
we as spectators will notice much difference in the helmets next year, as striking as they
may seem displayed naked on a podium like this.
For a sport where drivers fly around at up to 300 km/h with their head poking out of
the car, with the Halo and this new helmet F1 may well have narrowed the risk of severe
head injury to extremely extraordinary circumstances.