So sad. RIP.

Yes, please post the link to help the family. Thanks...

 

Tragic & sad. We all dismiss the danger that we are involved in. To minimize it we add safety to our vehicles and protocols such as track flagging. There will always be incidents on track and everyone needs to follow the procedures in place to minimize the risk to all parties. I have personally witnessed twice a driver exiting a vehicle on a hot track that was neither on fire or emergency assistance was not present. As drivers we need to attend the drivers meeting and understand the protocols. When I have an incident, I need to visually find the flag station tap the roof of my car or give a thumbs up that i am OK and wait until the emergency vehicle arrives.

 

Very sad! RIP

Brings back to mind that this is a dangerous hobby and there are aspects of it that are totally out of your control and can cause significant harm to you, your car and others.

FWIW - I have never seen a corner worker enter a hot track, even when a car was on fire.

 

Which highlights the value of having good safety equipment, to reduce the consequences for the driver if you lose control and crash. We all need to ask ourselves: IF I crash, how protected am I?

 

Makes me feel not so bad about ratting out a corner worker at TWS who was just walking back from picking up debris from the apex of T6 as I was coming to the entry of T6 - it was very unnerving. No flags, hot track.

Really sad about this guy. The corner workers are the unsung heroes of track events and make our weekends possible - often for very little or no payment.

RIP

-Mike

 

Very sad indeed. As I'm sure all of us that have been doing this a long time, we know a lot of flaggers personally and are good friends with many. They keep us safe from ourselves...they should never be in a position to be harmed.
Prayers to the family and all affected.

 

Ugh this is as tragic as it gets

 

Probability of crashing > 0 (even as a passenger), so should be a `when`, not `if`.

 

Yes, probability of crashing per lap, session, or day is low, but it increases to a high percentage as the total number of track days increases. The majority of drivers will get to 50 track days without crashing, but only a minority will get to 200+ days without crashing. This is based on stats, so we're talking averages, and of course driver behavior makes a very large difference on the probability of crashing. But this incident shows us that it's not only about driver behavior, factors outside our control can also cause us to crash. There's an element of luck involved, and if you do enough trials, bad luck will likely eventually appear.

 

As a back-of-the-napkin likelihood estimate, you can model with a Poisson distribution... assuming independent events and a low 1/N probability of an accident in a given day, then P(k)≈1/(e⋅k!) for N days which approximates to 63% chance of at least one accident where N is based on the stats for the overall pop of people participating in track days and ignoring other factors

 

I'm not clear on how you got 63%.

 

The probability that 0 events occur is 1/(e*0!) or 1/e = 0.368, so the complement, or the probability that at least one event occurs is 0.632.

Again, I'm specifically saying that this applies if the probability of an accident is 1/N for any random event, then this is the probability if you participate in N events.

 

Got it, thanks.

If the average crash rate is 1 per N track days, the probability of not crashing in X days is (1 - 1/N) ^X. People can easily estimate N for their local events by counting the number of cars that crash at their next few events, relative to the number of drivers and number of event days. For example, if you have 150 drivers at a two-day event, and there are two crashes, you have two crashes per 300 net track days, so an average of 1 crash per 150 days. My rule of thumb for such an event has been that 0 crashes means it was a good event, 1 or 2 crashes was sort of normal, and 3+ crashes was cause for extra concern. At smaller events (say 30 cars for a day), crashes should be unlikely, so even one crash could warrant raised eyebrows.

 

93.772% of statistics are made up on the spot

 

Statistics don't lie.
Statisticians lie like a rug....