Avoid ZAMP products - no service after the sale

[dc]

Ok, enough.

This will stop immediately or both parties will be removed from the forums. This isn’t recess. Dial back the insults, both of you.

[romoman]

Personally, I think it's time for clubs to step away from Snell unless they freeze their requirements for a couple of cycles. The helmets keep getting bigger (in the Zamp I could no longer look down and barely turn my head - which has it's own safety implications), more expensive, the manufacturers take longer and longer each cycle to get their testing down which leads to shortages and waivers at the beginning each new cycle.

And there appears to be no evidence that folks are dying from lack of head protection - unless you go head-first into a catch fence pole at 200mph, and my guess is there's not going to be a helmet standard that fixes that problem.

The problem is, Snell needs to keep making money and if they stop they will become irrelevant, so the gravy train continues.

Having talked to and discussed helmet safety with Ed Becker, the head of Snell, I think this is pretty off base. I'm sure other in the industry have better insight, but the mission of Snell is to make racing safer. It's their charter.

People should buy whatever they want. I used to buy a discounted model that was the second acceptable cert, use it for 5 years, and get a new one. Now I've learned a lot about helmets and I buy a Stand21, custom fit to me, and make the budget work.

[Rick Kirchner]

please elaborate on what is off-base.

[romoman]

please elaborate on what is off-base.

The shell size is a function of safety and energy absorption, not anything else. Price that comes with inflation, extra safety, newer materials, etc.

The delays in the standard are not due to testing - it's the manufacturers agreeing on the new spec and having it finalized, then making sure their helmets meet the spec.

Snell's standards have nothing to do with them making money but attempting to make you safer. As we learn more about head injuries (concussions, bsf, etc), materials advance, and cars get faster, it takes a higher level of protection to keep people safe. That is what Snell is doing. Now, if you want to compare a helmet from 2000 to one today, you'll see that today's helmets are much safer. Compare an FIA helmet to a Snell helmet and you'll see significant differences.

Check out Snell and the standards here https://www.smf.org/home or for the helmet faq https://www.smf.org/helmetfaq

Also, I suggest you attend something like a Racing Goes Safer Seminar https://www.racinggoessafer.org/ They bring in a number of very knowledgeable people and you will learn a lot. Listening to neurosurgeons and people like Terry Trammel tell you about what is important for your safety may change your opinions. You'll certainly leave more knowledgeable.

Here are some videos from those seminars

Concussions https://youtu.be/sITNlmEYp1U

Helmet Selection https://youtu.be/CGufSPDalyw

[problemchild]

Snell's standards have nothing to do with them making money but attempting to make you safer.

Any regulatory process has merits and flaws, excessiveness and waste, and is always compromised by political and financial forces Like many topics in the world today, and on apexspeed, you will never get any consensus.

Many people believe racing, at our level, has been hurt by the cost of safety items and programs designed to protect drivers in cars doing 200+mph beside walls and fences. By regulation, drivers in FV, SM, and SRF struggling to see 100+mph are required to have many of those costly items. In the next breath, we run our SCCA class cars on very fast sections of the oval track at places like Daytona, NHIS, Homestead, and Pocono where the safety challenges are crazy. We had 40 year old tube-frame formula cars, and mostly stock street cars, doing over 150mph on the banking at the Daytona Runoffs.

Our racing is full of contradictions and hypocrisies. Personally, I would race my FF without arm restraints and HNR, and feel safer, but I would not race it at Daytona. I know others that would race at Daytona without 2nd thought, but not do a lap without their HNR. At the end of the day, we make our own decisions about what level of safety works for us. We also make our own decisions about whether Snell, SFI, and FIA are doing more for our safety than scamming us so they can build their bank accounts.

[EricP]

Here are some videos from those seminars

Concussions https://youtu.be/sITNlmEYp1U

Helmet Selection https://youtu.be/CGufSPDalyw

At 6:06 Trammel says there is an "add-on" that can be glued to the front of the helmet. Probably smart for open cars. Anyone know where to get one?

[EACIII]

xxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx not relevant


Ed

[Rick Kirchner]

"The delays in the standard are not due to testing - it's the manufacturers agreeing on the new spec and having it finalized, then making sure their helmets meet the spec."

I think this is somewhat self-contradicting, but makes my point anyway.

"Now, if you want to compare a helmet from 2000 to one today, you'll see that today's helmets are much safer."

By what real-world metric? The only way to objectively verify this would be to take injuries in 2000 related to the head, categorize them by specific cause, look at the spec changes as they relate to those causes, and then look at the injuries related to the head after those changes took effect - and you would still need to normalize the data for stuff like differences in the number of miles of racing and they types of cars raced (opportunities for occurrence and other mitigating factors like the HANS and the fact that there are a lot more track day and sedans racing now compared to open wheel back then.

"The shell size is a function of safety and energy absorption, not anything else." I agree, but to what end? When do we all have a "Gary Busey helmet"? What purpose does it serve to have so much safety gear on that I can no longer comfortably race my car? Am I supposed to sell it?

My car is no faster (with me driving it) than it was when the first owner and engineer did the most development on it in 1996. But my helmet is four times as expensive over a period of time where inflation has been almost zero in real terms (but obviously the index represents an average of which automotive stuff has little influence). Unless you have a carbon helmet, the material costs have likely gone down with the exception of a 10" piece of kevlar for the chinstrap and the Nomex liner—and that's dollars, not hundreds of dollars.

I'm not saying that Snell doesn't do good work. What I am saying is that it is becoming irrelevant in real terms to us.

[Daryl DeArman]

At 6:06 Trammel says there is an "add-on" that can be glued to the front of the helmet. Probably smart for open cars. Anyone know where to get one?

Adam & Eve?

[EricP]

Adam & Eve?

Maybe... but my wife prefers just the balaclava...

[Rick Kirchner]

The videos above are interesting, but not really relevant to the discussion here at all. In one, 50% of it talks about the differences in juvenile and adult helmet requirements. The last 50 %, to cut to the chase, just says your helmet needs to fit tighter than you think.

Olvey's video again is interesting if you want to learn about concussion, but there is very little discussion about racing helmets and how they reduce the incidence of concussion (and honestly, that's only part of the function). Most disturbingly, the discussion regarding angular acceleration physics is just wrong, but common in the medical profession. MDs get physics in pre-med and most pay little attention to it, lets alone the details, for the rest of their careers. Acceleration is mass independent until you start talking about forces applied, momentum, and energy. I realize he was trying to relate some physics to people that don't do physics, but it missed the mark on accuracy.

I worked with the Naval Hospital physicians at Camp Lejeune for 3 years instrumenting ranges and Marines in order to try and better understand blast TBI. It has no relation to concussion or TBI acquired by more "traditional" means. Blast is a shock wave that transits the body and creates discontinuities as it moves from one level of density to another, including pressurizing and de-pressurizing bodily fluids which can cause microscopic bubble formation and bursting that destroys cells on the microscopic level. At the same time the head is exposed to the motions associated with traditional concussion, both from pressure acting on the surface as a large force and creating sudden motion, to the sudden stop when the Marine is thrown against an object or falls to the ground, so there's typically a double concussive event along with the blast induced damage.

[stonebridge20]

Maybe... but my wife prefers just the balaclava...

So does mine. I think she's sick of looking at me.