Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: Angel Eyes on June 11, 2017, 01:28:25 PM
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Richard Hammond crashed an electric sports car while test driving it in Switzerland:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/11/europe/richard-hammond-crash-top-gear/index.html
Not very good video of the crash:
https://youtu.be/kCwBBaZ7UAE
Looks like he messed up his left knee, but he appears to be OK otherwise.
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Someone screwed up and identified the link as hammon crash TOP GEAR.
Yeah, that ship sailed, or car drove away, a long time ago.
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Hammond can't crash because he is "a driving God!"
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All three of them have had some impressive crashes, even James May.
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Not enough video to see very well, and I have no way to slow it down, but it looked much like he was off the line through the right hand corner, which left him WAAAY off the line for the left-hander, with no earthly possibility of hitting the apex.
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Not enough video to see very well, and I have no way to slow it down, but it looked much like he was off the line through the right hand corner, which left him WAAAY off the line for the left-hander, with no earthly possibility of hitting the apex.
He had a slight skid/slide in the right-hander, before losing it on the left-hander. Looked a bit too fast, as well.
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He had a slight skid/slide in the right-hander, before losing it on the left-hander. Looked a bit too fast, as well.
Yes but, as I saw it (which is admittedly not well, because of the schizophrenic camera work and editing) he was either totally off the apex (and line) for the right hander, or was so massively late for the apex that the little skid was the result of trying (too late) to get back to the line and set himself up for the left-hander.
The little skid just set the stage for the big skid. As a professional race driver and instructor expressed it once, many years ago, tires have a fixed amount of friction to apply to the road. Whatever it is for that tire, it's 100%. That 100 percent can be used for accelerattion, deceleration, and/or cornering, but the total can never exceed 100 percent. So if you're using 75 percent to go around the corner, you ONLY have 25 percent left for braking. Try to use 26 percent for braking, and off you go.
Once the tires break traction, you MUST slow down (or straighten out) in order to regain traction. This is best seen at drag races. The death knell for a good run is "going up in smoke" off the starting line, because once you break traction you have to let off the gas to "hook up" again.
Back to Hammond: At 0:07 in the video, he was on the left side of the road with his front wheels still turned right, when he should have been on the right side (or in the center) of the road and already turning left into the apex of the left-hander. He was fooked basically from about 0:05 on ... or before.
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Sounds like the most dangerous thing about being Richard Hammond... is being Richard Hammond.
Brad
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I wonder if the electric power application and harvesting is seamless and intuitive. Even on high end and high horsepower gas cars there is some lag and a linear rise in torque and RPM even if you mat it.
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Sounds like the most dangerous thing about being Richard Hammond... is being Richard Hammond.
Brad
Meh.
A big part of the dude's job is driving race cars and/or super cars as fast as he can. You gonna wreck a couple. The other presenters have wrecked them. Professional Race Car drivers wreck pretty regular. The Stig put a Koenigsegg CCX through a tirewall and spun a couple hundred feet through the runoff.
Hammond had the misfortune of coming off the road on a corner that had a drop so he got a good roll going, and the batteries caught fire. Drive fast and you will wreck occasionally.
It is true that his line for both those corners was pretty crappy. I suspect he came into the first one too fast, and didn't get the car fully back under control before the road left him.
FWIW that's a 1200HP AWD electric car. It probably gets going pretty quick without many of the audio and sensory clues a normal car gives.
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"The Stig put a Koenigsegg CCX through a tirewall and spun a couple hundred feet through the runoff."
I enjoyed that episode.
It also made Koenigsegg put a spoiler on the rear deck. The modified car was one of the fastest to ever go around the track.
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And now the Hamster has a new knee. Or at least a rebuilt knee.
https://drivetribe.com/p/diG52lAZT9-UqACKIDDYSw?iid=Nm573F9QQtiPGhnZJr2zmw