F1 still looking to protect drivers head

Following Conor Daly’s GP3 accident in Monaco, Charlie Whiting, Formula 1′s Race Director provided a fascinating insight into the current levels of safety and accepted driving standards in the sport.

With regard to canopies on cars:
Q. Debris very luckily missed the cars coming through it. How are things going at the FIA with your investigations into cockpit safety?

Whiting: That’s a big project and we’ve tried fighter jet canopies. They work but there are quite a few problems with those. They need to be 30 millimeters thick which presents sufficient optical difficulties. We need to try and get something that you can see through when you’re sat down there and that’s very hard. We tried a roll structure. It’s an ugly thing but it did the job. So next we’re trying to find something that’ll be a deflector. In the end we may have to end up with something that will help a lot but won’t eradicate the likelihood of something hitting a driver. It may not prove to be impossible to completely eradicate that. Even if you put a driver in a closed car, there’s no guarantee a wheel won’t fly through the windscreen for example. We are doing our best, the guys at the Institute are doing a lot of work on this, but it is not the work of a moment and it is fraught with difficulty.

Editor's Note: Well it is clear the F1 safety institute have not spoken to the correct people. AR1.com contacted a jet fighter canopy manufacturer that makes canopies for fighter jets traveling at over 2,000 mph and not only do their canopies have optical clarity for the pilots, they are protected with a special see-through coating that reflects the sun light out.