On Fri, 04 May 2001 15:30:05, "Jeff Cashmore" <cashmo@hotmail.com> said:
>"The "anouncers explained everything else, why not that methanol does not
>burn in water or even that it burns clear."
>One year at Indy I asked a corner/safety worker why he carried cotton balls.
>He said that when he arrived at a crash scene and he wasn't sure if a car
>was on fire, he'd throw a couple on the car to see if they went up in smoke.
When I've worked CART's Detroit Grand Prix, each station has a 55 gallon
drum of water (sometimes two) and a number of 5-gallon buckets. We're
sometimes also issued water-based fire bottles. CART is rather adamant
that they don't want the SCCA standard-issue dry-chemical bottles used on
their cars, and for each CART session during the weekend (which is
typically shared with TransAm, a Neon Charity Challenge race, and sometimes
Barber-Dodge as well as the CART Champ Cars and Indy Lights), the dry-chem
bottles are "bagged" to discourage their use. When we go to a car (almost
never for CART -- their safety crew does most of it), we are to take a
5-gallon bucket of water. It sounds silly, and looks sillier: run as fast
as you can, with an open 5-gallon bucket full of water, and still get there
with enough to throw on the car. If there's any doubt (I'll remember the
cotton ball trick... I like that), throw the water on the car. That said,
I've thankfully never experienced any external combustion at a race worse
than the flash fire from Jimmy Vasser's gearbox lube when he backed it into
the wall at Turn 10 in '96. It went out immediately, and Jimmy appeared to
be okay, despite pretzeling his steering wheel with his wrists. As it
turned out, he jarred his inner ear enough that he sat out the next couple
of races.
Jim "Rollover Prince" Crider, who worked his *third* race rollover in a
year and a half today at Waterford Hills. Driver not even scratched, great
cage in her ITC Fiesta. On the bright side, I think I found a customer for
my driveway queen Fiesta. If this keeps up, I'm going to get a reputation
in the F&C community...
|