Time to stop IndyCar injuries

It's always surprising how easily race drivers can go incognito simply by throwing on civilian clothes.

The location is the Mid-Ohio paddock a couple of weeks ago and Ryan Briscoe is shooting the breeze, the Australian's 'disguise' of sunglasses, jeans and a black shirt proving enough to thwart many of the fans milling around looking for drivers to photograph themselves with.

For a guy sidelined by an injury, Briscoe seems in good spirits. He jokes about watching a practice session from trackside and being treated to the surreal sight of seeing his own helmet lapping the circuit without him. [Compatriot James Davison borrowed it for his debut with Dale Coyne Racing, due to his own lid not meeting IndyCar standards.]

He talks up the benefits of the new-style connector cables for the iPhone 5. And he answers endless questions about the reason he's standing around in jeans in the first place: the stiches up the inside of his right wrist, a souvenir from recent surgery to repair a fracture sustained in a crash in Toronto. He's mostly baffled by the huge, multicoloured bruises that have appeared higher up his arm, towards the elbow.

"I don't know if they're from the accident or the surgery - I've heard that they clamp your arm down when they're operating," he says. "But it looks pretty weird."

Briscoe's injury was not especially severe: by Mid-Ohio his cast had been replaced by a slender carbonfibre splint, and he wore the same device when he returned to the cockpit at the Sonoma test last week. But for many in the IndyCar paddock the fact that his injury happened at all is cause for concern, for it was far from an isolated incident.

Briscoe on the sidelines © XPB

A GROWING PROBLEM

Figures show that in recent years, there has been an increase in wrist and hand injuries in IndyCar, and the issue is shaping up to become one of the next major staging grounds in the ongoing push to improve safety.

In addition to Briscoe, this year's victims of similar injuries have also included Tony Kanaan and Ryan Hunter-Reay (who hurt himself at Barber Motorsports Park, and then aggravated the injury when he was torpedoed by Takuma Sato at Pocono). It was revealed last week that Sato himself has been carrying a similar injury for some time, a condition that he exacerbated during a recent apartment move.

Briscoe's unintended weekend off at Mid-Ohio coincided with the debut of an update to the DW12 intended to help address this very problem. At the series' request, Dallara released an aluminium steering arm that was designed to break before the forces in an accident could be transferred to the steering wheel - and, potentially, an unlucky driver's hand.

The new part was optional and with some scepticism over whether it will actually help, sources suggest that only six cars used it.

"This is just me talking, but I'm not 100 per cent sure that [the aluminum arm] is really going to fix the problem," says Derrick Walker, IndyCar's president of competition and operations.

"Saying to everybody, 'You will have this' didn't seem like the right thing to do, so instead we said that those who want to participate can use these aluminium ones so that we can get some usage of them and see if they really work.

Walker admits he's not convinced the aluminium arm will solve the problem © LAT

"I think there's a bigger subject building - and this is me speaking personally again - in the steering-wheel design and the rack, how the rack sends the shock wave to the drivers.

"We're looking at two other things at the moment. We're looking at shock absorbers on the steering rack, and the other one is the steering effort; power-steering. That will take out some of the shock waves, or slow down the rate of the shock waves."

The revised steering arm was championed by Dale Coyne Racing's Justin Wilson, who remembered similar equipment being used during the Champ Car era. The Brit admits that it may not present an instant solution, but argues that it can't hurt either.

"The Champ Cars and the old IndyCars had aluminium steering arms, and typically they would snap before other things got damaged," he says.

"Over the last two years we've seen a lot of people with broken wrists, broken steering racks, broken steering columns, and the steering arm is still intact - it's not even twisted.

"So a lot of feedback we got as drivers when we were all ending up with broken wrists was that the steering arm has got to give way before that load comes back up and through. It needed someone to kind of take control, so I went to Derrick and said, 'We've got to get this fixed'.

"So many drivers have been either compromised or missed races because of this that it's crazy. I don't really know what the right answer is, but we're just trying to take little steps, and if this saves one driver [from injury] between now and the next step, then that's a good thing."

LONG-TERM SOLUTIONS

Dallara itself is unconvinced that a tweaked steering arm will act as a magic bullet, with the company's US boss Stefano di Ponti telling AUTOSPORT that his company made the revision in the spirit of cooperation rather than to address what it felt was the core of the problem.

He agrees, however, that there is a broader issue that needs to be discussed.

"We were asked to make this part, and for sure Dallara is happy to look into this problem and help," he says. "For us, it's only a small part of the issue, but by providing it we show that we support these efforts and are doing something to look into it.

It can be hard to avoid trouble on IndyCar's street courses © XPB

"But there is more we can do. Absolutely. We've been talking with IndyCar, and we've had good input from them to understand what sort of injuries the drivers had, and we're working together to try to find the best solution."

Key to finding an answer is reaching an agreement about what is causing the problem in the first place. The fact that such injuries have increased is not in doubt - indeed, it is supported by IndyCar's own safety data.

That the spike has been so recent has led some to conclude that the design of the DW12 may play some part, but this is not correct: Dr Michael Olinger, IndyCar's director of medical services, confirmed to AUTOSPORT that the initial increase in hand and wrist injuries actually predates the current car by one or two years. Nevertheless, empirical evidence casts doubt for some.

"From what I've heard from mechanics, they've been surprised with this car that when there's an accident, the steering arm will go through and break the whole housing mechanism, and the steering arm won't even break," says Briscoe.

"But the statistics have shown that wrist injuries started happening on the old car - the numbers started getting high in 2011. I think it's related more to the number of street courses than the actual car.

"And going in at a slower speed, I think, makes it worse. At a higher speed, it just breaks on impact. But when you go in slower, like with my accident, it's quick enough to grip the steering wheel and injure you, but the steering arm doesn't actually break."

The theory of a correlation between the injuries and street courses has supporters elsewhere in the paddock, including Wilson.

Wilson broke his wrist at the Surfers Paradise Champ Car event in 2006 © LAT

"I think street tracks encourage the problem," he says. "The first time I broke my wrist in recent years was at Surfers [in 2006] - they put a set of tyres at the apex of the last corner, I brushed it, and it grabbed the wheel. That was with aluminium steering arms, and I still broke my wrist.

"Tyre on tyre... I just brushed it, and it snapped the wheel. [ED: Briscoe's accident was also tyre-on-tyre]. It's things like that situation where you think, 'OK, is there something else we could do?' and that's where power-steering may help.

"We don't want to slow down the way we steer, because when you get sideways you have to react fast. I don't know if you saw the onboard of James Jakes's crash at Toronto, but [the steering wheel] was like sticking your hand into a food blender."

IS IT ENOUGH?

Hunter-Reay agrees with Wilson, although he remains unconvinced that even a change as radical as introducing power-steering - a move that would cancel out one of the defining characteristics of an IndyCar - would necessarily help.

"Looking at the steering-wheel design might help, but sometimes when it comes off, it comes around and the other side gets your thumb," he says. "It happens so fast. If you leave your hands on the wheel, you're susceptible to that.

"I think it's more in the geometry of the car - we have a lot of kickback in this car, and when you go over bumps it really reacts a lot. I think that's some of it. But unfortunately it's low on the list of things for the series to figure out mid-season."

But Briscoe is not convinced that kickback is part of the problem.

"I wouldn't say it's worse with this car," he argues. "It depends how much caster you have. You can make it have a lot of kickback, or you can make it have not so much.

"In a way it would be sad to see power-steering come in, because one of the good things about these cars is that they are challenging to drive, and you have the kickback and everything. Power-steering would make them easier to drive. But it's probably an inevitable part of the future."

As Hunter-Reay suggests, the complexity of the problem and, potentially, its solution, are likely too great to allow anything to be resolved during this season.

Will swapping a tiny bit of steel for aluminium help? Who knows? But with three of the remaining five races scheduled for street courses, we may get a couple of opportunities to find out.