In reply to smokindav:
The Rocket car was the blown tire.
In reply to smokindav:
The Rocket car was the blown tire.
JtspellS wrote: Poor hamster can't catch a break........
Actually he's gotten at least 2 giant ones.
Richard Hammond reporting from the hospital, with a little help from James May:
Looked to me like he overcooked that turn. Uh, "no run-off" there.
Update: Post-recovery interview:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/18oAkxwYQh0
Did pretty well for getting into a huge crash with just a 3pt harness on...
It's called trailing throttle oversteer, Rich. You own a 911, mate.
If you study the video, it appears it all went wrong on the corner before. He appears to have appexed the corner wrong, carried too much speed, and left himself with only an early apex on the corner he crashed. In a mid engine car, you can throttle steer to a large degree and rotate out of some mistakes, but he was carrying far too much speed to do so.
I don't get why the article makes that accident sound so bad. Car looks ok considering and he wasn't that injured all told. That was a pretty mundane crash for something that could go 200mph going off of a drop off at race speeds.
Just a note, but I wonder how a Tesla would have faired in similar circumstances. They've put "Not catching on fire" as a priority.
We use the same batteries as the Tesla in some of our products, and if you damage one of the batteries, they can experience heat events taking all the other batteries with them. (I speak from experience here. At the moment there is about a 5% failure rate in our products) In the case of the Tesla from my understanding, they are about the size of double A's put together in a pack, and of course there are many packs of them. It's in the thousands per car. To me this is one of the biggest drawbacks of electric cars at the moment. I would imagine in Hammond's case, a battery pack was damaged, and once that happens, bad things with heat and fire follow.
By the way, this is why there is such a limitation on flying them as well.
I'm not sure how "mid-engine" this car is/was; anyone know the weight distribution? My guess is that it's probably pretty close to 50/50. I was impressed with how the company is trying to make the best of the situation instead of suing Hammond.
Wonder how much the insurance payoff was for.
I certainly don't want to see this man, or anyone, get hurt motor racing, but Richard Hammond has exceeded his available talent multiple times and cheated death several times. Look up his attempt to drive a Renault F1 a few years back. His whole over reaching story in a nutshell.
Vigo wrote: I don't get why the article makes that accident sound so bad. Car looks ok considering and he wasn't that injured all told. That was a pretty mundane crash for something that could go 200mph going off of a drop off at race speeds.
From the description in the video posted above, it sounded pretty bad to me - the car flew quite a ways and rolled multiple times.
From my watching the video and listening to the exchange, it appears to me that Richard exceeded the programming limits of the car and the programming limits now will need to be changed.
This has been a fear with all computerized controlled bits & pieces.
He had tried to get oversteer previously and couldn't do it but once he exceeded programming limitations and got oversteer it became a completely different car.
The owner of the company kept saying the car tried to rotate, due to it's programming and Hammond kept saying we could never get it to rotate like that before.
So it's not like trailing throttle oversteer that we are used to, this was the computer doing it.
Had it understeered as the car had been doing previously (where he almost ran over a camera man due to the understeer) Hammond would have gone off at an angle but front first. Would it have been better? I'll have to go back and look at the maps and see where that would have had him heading.
carguy123 wrote: So it's not like trailing throttle oversteer that we are used to, this was the computer doing it.
I disagree. It was exactly what happens to any car when you exceed the grip available, and there is only so much a computer can do. Lift off the throttle, crank the steering wheel hard. Weight comes off the rear, lands on the fronts, and around you go. Any car at those limits will spin.
@jharry3 respectfully have you driven a car with down force on cold slicks? for anyone who hasn't it's easy to be critical. Even with tire warmers the level of performance is such that someone whose background is production cars would struggle mightily. The driving style is much much different, our sports racer "only" managed to pull 3Gs on the brakes and the braking points were 150-200ft deeper than world challange cars. The car was also 12 seconds slower than Indy Lites cars which are 7-8 seconds slower than F1 cars. Hammond may or may not be a hack , you can dog him for the video or looping a car in a huge way at Misano but using the F1 segment isn't a very good benchmark.
As for the computor and or nannay contributing; some systems are better than others; I've cooked the rear brakes on an Honda S2000 & had a argument with a Carrera 4 in which the nanny was adament about not allowing the car to rotate qucikly..............so I could see how if you were trying to compensate for big understeer and the car suddenly stopped that you'd be in the weeds in a hurry.
The video did appear at first glance as if he got caught out on a narrow road, perhaps there is more to it.
carguy123 wrote: From my watching the video and listening to the exchange, it appears to me that Richard exceeded the programming limits of the car and the programming limits now will need to be changed. This has been a fear with all computerized controlled bits & pieces.
Sounds to me more like he simply exceeded the grip limits of the tires, perhaps because the car's traction control program made the amount of grip available seem greater than it actually was. Maybe he thought the rear had a deathgrip on the road due to the traction control programming preventing all oversteer, so he could scandi it to make it rotate around a tight corner - not a bad idea for very high-grip cars, but he found out the hard way that he's overestimated the rear grip.
Listen to the video again and hear the owner of the company say that the COMPUTER tried to rotate the car. This isn't just a case of exceeding the tire's limits, although that happened too. Once the computer decided what to do Hammond was just a passenger.
Who or what was trying to rotate the car is moot. Off throttle, flick to the right followed by a hard crank to the left will spin you every time, unless you have a straight piece of road to collect it.
Streetwiseguy wrote: Who or what was trying to rotate the car is moot. Off throttle, flick to the right followed by a hard crank to the left will spin you every time, unless you have a straight piece of road to collect it.
It's not totally moot, as dealing with the aftermath of over-doing something like that gets even harder when the car reacts to it in a way you weren't expecting.
It's not moot at all since the actions weren't of Hammond's doing, it was the computer programmer's. Once the car lost control then you could argue that it reacted the same way, but the root cause was the programmer's lack of imagination or foresight.
You can bet that won't happen the same way again.
Also this car doesn't react the same way as the petrol cars you are used to. All 4 wheels had power and completely independent control. This would allow you to do things the traditional set up wouldn't.
The only possible alternative for the car or the driver, which ever one was at fault, (Once they got too deep, going too quickly) was to go straight off the end of the road. In hindsight, maybe the better choice.
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