Driver Safety: What you need to check out
This is our second installment in a series of articles that are dealing with all aspects of Racer Safety. We hope you find something in these articles that can make your race day or the trip to the races a little safer.
 This is a pretty standard view of what drag racers who are required to wear the 3.2A/5 fire suits are getting. These are Impact Racing products. |
SAFETY HARNESS
I covered a little bit about harnesses in the first Racer Safety 101 article last month. To get that information just use the Archives button at the top of the page and go to the February issue or click on the link at the bottom of this article.
There were a couple things that I found in my research and interviews that stood out. The first thing was the two distinct opinions on what is the best material for racing safety harness. After looking over the latest test data I got from Safety Solutions and talking to them I am convinced polyester is the best material for racing safety harnesses. This information came from an independent lab and Safety Solutions doesn’t even manufacture a safety harness. They found the results while testing their R3 and the Hutchens head and neck restraints.
 This is the most common type of racing harness in use today. The aircraft-type latch is reliable and EZ to use. These harnesses are all SFI 16.1 certified with two-year expiration dates sewn on them. |
 This is Simpson's latest Platinum series harness. Notice the dual anti-submarine belts. When mounted correctly it will stabilize you much better in an accident. |
For some reason most of the racing safety harnesses made in the USA have traditionally been made out of nylon and not polyester. That is beginning to change as more and more test data becomes available. Nylon passes all of the stringent SFI requirements and served the industry and protected racers well for years. According to my contact at Simpson Safety all of their harnesses are now polyester. Impact uses polyester and the Platinum series at RCI is also polyester. I wish I had more to report from different companies but for some reason they did not respond to my attempts to get information from them.
