IndyCar’s Aeroscreen Gets Its First Real Test, Saves Lives in Iowa Race

07/18/2020 USA


  • Colton Herta (L) flies over Rinus VeeKay (R) after a potentially unpleasant accident at Iowa Speedway.

  • An uncharacteristic mistake by Penske’s pit crew left Will Power on a loose wheel. When he parted company with the rest of his vehicle, the car slid down the track and then returned to the wall. In the process, the wheel ran over the top of Power’s car but was deflected from his head by the Aeroscreen.

  • The position on the pole was for Conor Daly, seen here getting into his car through the top of the spray screen. The cooling hose fitted to your helmet is something new for 2020, because a disadvantage of the Aeroscreen has been the increase in cabin temperatures.

The biggest change to IndyCar in 2020, aside from a coronavirus-altered schedule, has been the addition of the new Aeroscreen that protects the driver of every single race car. On Friday night at Iowa Speedway, the Aeroscreen obtained the first real evidence in a couple of potentially horrible accidents; Happily, the new security feature passed with great success.

The Aeroscreen was developed last year for IndyCar by Red Bull Advanced Technologies. The engineering consultancy for the championship-winning Formula 1 team originally proposed something similar for F1 in 2016, but that was rejected in favor of the Halo device, the part that looks like a flip-flop strap, which we’ve seen in other open ones. of open cabin wheels in recent years.

The Aeroscreen refines the two ideas. There’s a Pankl-made titanium frame, attached to the carbon fiber monocoque around the car’s cabin, which weighs 28.7lbs (13kg) and can withstand a load of 34,000lbs (15,422kg). This is wrapped by a PPG-manufactured laminated polycarbonate ballistic windshield weighing 17.3 lbs (7.8 kg), capable of withstanding the impact of a 2 lb (0.9 kg) object traveling at 220 mph (354 km / h).

From some angles, particularly head-on, the Aeroscreen can make an attractive race car look slouchy. And last night’s winner Simon Pagenaud previously told me that cabin temperatures have seriously increased inside the Dallara IR-12 car as drivers are no longer cooled by high-speed airflow. But I think that after last night’s protests, drivers will take a little more heat stress as an acceptable reward for a much safer car.

The first incident occurred on lap 144 of the 250-lap event, when a pit fault left driver Will Power’s car with a left front wheel loose. As the wheel made its way across the oval track, it bounced and was deflected from Power by the Aeroscreen.

“Man, I can’t thank IndyCar enough for everything they have safely done with the Aeroscreen and the halo inside the Aeroscreen. You just saw Colton Herta outdo someone, and they have done a tremendous job. It’s better than any another series that invented something like that. It’s just a very good job, “Power said after the race, also referring to the second big crash of the night.

This took place on lap 157 ironically as the race was about to restart after the caution period caused by the Power crash. The restart was suspended due to an incident further up the field, but that information did not reach Colton Herta in time, and when it accelerated, it was launched into the air by the car in front of it belonging to Rinus VeeKay. As you can see from the video embedded in the tweet below, this time the Aeroscreen kept VeeKay safe from Herta’s wheels as the car raced over his. Herta also avoided a much more unpleasant crash thanks to the Safer barrier overlying Iowa Speedway: if the young driver’s gearbox were trapped in the fencing, the results could have been much more serious.

The debris from this crash could also have caused real problems for Marcus Ericsson, who was right behind at the time. But he told Racer magazine that he, too, was spared from injuries thanks to Aeroscreen.

All four drivers will join the rest of the grid for a second race at Iowa Speedway on Saturday night at 8:45 pm ET.

Ad image by Chris Jones / IndyCar

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