What happened here. What did he hit? A curb? How can you have things track side that will do that to a car?
Edit: I did a little more reading and it seems someone thought putting a sausage curb on the outside of the Parabolica was a good idea. I hope that individual is religated to ticket collection duties moving forward.
That is about one of the dumbest things I have seen.
Looks like a cover over a storm drain, or access to underground electrical, or something similar. It looks flush to the ground before he gets there, which makes me wonder if the aero on the nose lifted the car a bit, and the undertray caught the edge and pole-vaulted him.
EDIT: I see the source has been correctly identified.
How in the berk did he survive that?!? 
Looks like the extra temporary curbing has a hard edge on it facing the cars and he caught it with the front lip of his skid plate.
Yikes! That was insane. They might want to look at that. Maybe paint it orange or something.
So that's what they were talking about as the reason for the race director in the F1 race declaring a strict lap plus next lap time deletion for going all four off in Parabolica. I'm very much for track limits and penalizing the drivers that go over it, but perhaps launching the car through the air like a cannonball is a little too harsh.
Anyone doubt the effectiveness of the Halos now?
I’m trying to predict how much farther the car will go, how many and what kind of rotations and hoping it’ll come around juuuuuuuuuust right and land in an ideal(?) way. It did not.
This makes Joey Hand's old "who put a ramp on the side of the track?" crash seem pretty tame.
The angle he hit the curb indicates he was going to have an off anyway.
Yes the curb was a dumb idea that made things worse.
You guys remember what the kid on the tricycle said at the end of Incredibles 1?
What he said.
Streetwiseguy said:You guys remember what the kid on the tricycle said at the end of Incredibles 1?
What he said.
“THAT WAS TOTALLY WICKED!”
iceracer said:The angle he hit the curb indicates he was going to have an off anyway.
Yes the curb was a dumb idea that made things worse.
He would have been over the curbing but there is pavement out there. So he probably would not have had any real problem AND he would have been faster. My understanding is the sausage curb was put there to keep people from using that “racing line” as it is faster.
Spectacular crash. Bad idea to put the sausage curb there. Good idea to punish going off track, but badly executed in a dangerous manner.
I don't think it was the curb that launched the car. I think it was the under tray. Yes the curb caught the leading edge of under tray, but I would call that a car problem. It's hard to tell how tall the curb is but a car that low should be able to drag/bounce across something like that without turning part of the car into a pole vault pole.
Freaky accident, I'm glad no one was injured.
Toyman01 said:I don't think it was the curb that launched the car. I think it was the under tray. Yes the curb caught the leading edge of under tray, but I would call that a car problem. It's hard to tell how tall the curb is but a car that low should be able to drag/bounce across something like that without turning part of the car into a pole vault pole.
Freaky accident, I'm glad no one was injured.
But these cars are spec cars. So they are all like that.
The teams can't change them.
The Peter Windsor video was very informative.
Toyman01 said:I don't think it was the curb that launched the car. I think it was the under tray. Yes the curb caught the leading edge of under tray, but I would call that a car problem. It's hard to tell how tall the curb is but a car that low should be able to drag/bounce across something like that without turning part of the car into a pole vault pole.
Freaky accident, I'm glad no one was injured.
So, apparently, this is what "sausage curb" looks like: 
To my eye, it isn't big or tall enough to launch the car that high. My guess is it just lifted the car enough that 2 things happened: 1. Downforce instantly went to zero when all the various wings and the body of the car exceeded the maximum angle of attack to generate downforce and 2. the undertray and various wings on the car grabbed enough air to effectively turn into a giant sail/kite. I'm still really surprised by how far/high the car went.
I don't think it was an aero launch, the car would have cleared the curb and not shed so many parts. And there was a lot of parts, it appears to me that there were more parts than just the tray.
It looked to me that the car undertray caught on a utility vault and pogo'd into the air.
He was already well outside the rumple strip when the car launched.
There is not enough info from the short video to see what really happened and what he hit.
There was a large Square piece that could have been a vault lid, and a lot of other debris that was undertray pieces.
I dont know what the tray looks like but that large square piece to me does not appear to be part of the car, that may be a vault lid.
Maybe the car moving over the top of the lid may have sucked it up where it caught on the tray and pogo'd the car.
I don't see a curb launching the car in that sort of fashion, besides to me it appeared that the car was well outside of the curb.
If you watch the video closely you can see the car move over something outside the curb and the entire tray stops and gets stripped off the bottom of the car and that appears to launch the car.
kazoospec said:To my eye, it isn't big or tall enough to launch the car that high. My guess is it just lifted the car enough that 2 things happened: 1. Downforce instantly went to zero when all the various wings and the body of the car exceeded the maximum angle of attack to generate downforce and 2. the undertray and various wings on the car grabbed enough air to effectively turn into a giant sail/kite. I'm still really surprised by how far/high the car went.
I was reading somewhere where they were 50mm (a little less then 2") high.
My money is on the curb catching the undertray and the undertray launching the car. The flying parts didn't look regular enough to me to be a cover for a subterranian vault
In reply to kazoospec :
I don't think that is a sausage curb. From what I have seen they are larger and usually orange and go the direction of the track, not against the direction.
Yep looks to me like the root cause was the car pole-vaulting on its own undertray. Remember that 2" is ride height at rest and it may be less as downforce ramps up at speed. If it's anything like F1 there's plenty of scraping going on near top speeds - that's why they have the wear-gauged jabroc board underneath to keep the scraping down to an acceptable level.
GameboyRMH said:Yep looks to me like the root cause was the car pole-vaulting on its own undertray. Remember that 2" is ride height at rest and it may be less as downforce ramps up at speed. If it's anything like F1 there's plenty of scraping going on near top speeds - that's why they have the wear-gauged jabroc board underneath to keep the scraping down to an acceptable level.
Watch the Peter Windsor video that Woody linked above. The curb height is set for an F1 car but the F2 & F3 cars run much lower, and it's too high for them. They've apparently been complaining about this to the FIA for 5 years now.
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