-
Regarding bodily constraint, I’ve read that one of the issues with grid iron football is that there’s no way of preventing the brain from jiggling around inside the skull in an impact (although proper hydration helps). I wonder what the stats are for race drivers and long term brain injury?
Eseman-
I suspect the difference between contact sports and motorsport is the frequency of the impacts. I've had one shunt that knocked me out, and one which left me a bit wobbly for a while, but that was in several years of racing. It's not like you're having your brain wobbled about week in, week out, plus training.
-
I'd imagine the NFL players get a lot more frequent heavy hits. I'd say most F1 drivers go through a season without a big crash (is it 25G that's the threshold for a medical centre visit?). Whereas I'm sure an NFL player will go through a fair number of hits in and around that region (at least according to the rugby article above) per game
Brommers
mmccarthy
Sure, but F1 drivers tend to be a fair bit more constrained in the event of a crash. (For reference, it would also be interesting to measure the differences between those accelerations in an F1 driver, and compare those differences to the rugby player (or other contact sport participant))
I still think that peak deceleration is a decent metric to compare the severity of different F1 crashes. Far from being pretty meaningless IMO.