In August 2002, Indy Racing League driver Richie Hearn crashed during a race at Kentucky Speedway. After his car made contact with another racer, Hearn was sent into the wall. The force of impact later was confirmed at an otherworldly 140 G-forces, or 140 times the weight of gravity, the greatest amount of force recorded in auto-racing history.
"I knew the hit was bad because I heard and felt it from the pits," his wife Brenda Hearn later wrote in a letter regarding the accident.
Yet Richie Hearn escaped the wreck with only a broken foot.
After the accident, Brenda Hearn wrote a letter to MSU biomechanical engineering Professor Robert Hubbard to thank him for saving her husband's life.
"I not only wanted to thank God, I wanted to thank you for still letting me sleep with the man that I love from the bottom of my heart," Brenda Hearn said in the letter.
"That letter still makes me cry," Hubbard said.
Hubbard is the inventor of the Head and Neck Support, or HANS, device. Used in auto racing to prevent potentially fatal head and neck injuries, the product keeps the driver's head from moving too far away from the body, therefore reducing tension placed on those fragile parts. Richie Hearn was wearing the device when he crashed.
The HANS uses a collar and yoke system made primarily of carbon fiber. It is fitted around the driver's neck with the yoke resting on the shoulders. The car's racing harness is pulled over the yoke to secure the HANS to the shoulders. Nylon tethers are routed through slits in the collar and are strapped to both sides of the driver's helmet by metal attachment pieces on the tethers.
It's a very compact device, only about an inch thick and a foot long. It weighs a mere 2 pounds.
Hubbard studies a world he says is hard to fathom - the world of crash mechanics.
"People don't understand what happens in these crashes," Hubbard said. "It's another world in terms of the forces involved and how quickly it happens."
The time frame of a crash is almost instantaneous, Hubbard said. It occurs within less than 100 milliseconds, which is a 10th of a second.
"It's literally a blink of an eye," he said.
The primary area of Hubbard's research is biomechanics, or the study of how the human body functions. His research in the field began while he was working on his doctoral thesis for the University of Illinois, where he studied the mechanical properties of skull bone.
"Head injury is a mechanical event that has biological and medical consequences," Hubbard said. "There wasn't much known as to how the head responded as a mechanical object."
Although his doctoral work was with the University of Illinois, he did his thesis research at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, formerly known as the Highway Safety Research Institute. After obtaining his doctorate in 1970, he spent another year at U-M before joining what now is known as the General Motors Collaborative Research Laboratories.
"GM was expanding a group to study injury mechanics, one doing basic injury mechanics and another interested in developing technologies to assess injury," Hubbard said. "We wanted to find out how you assess injury with automotive hardware."
The project, done in cooperation with the federal government, led to the development of the Hybrid III crash-test dummy, which is still in use today. In the project, Hubbard's primary involvement was in the development of the dummy's head. He also figured out the geometry of the dummy and how weight was distributed in it.
In 1977, Hubbard was appointed to MSU in the Department of Biomechanics, which was part of the College of Osteopathic Medicine as well as the College of Engineering. Hubbard's primary research at the time was with the College of Osteopathic Medicine, in which he studied the mechanical properties of tissues.
It seemed Hubbard's research was on a set course - until tragedy struck in the early 1980s, shifting his focus and the direction of his pursuits.
Made from scratch
Hubbard always had a long-standing interest in cars and racing, but that interest was accelerated in 1966 when he married JoAnn Downing, sister of International Motor Sports Association racer Jim Downing. Jim Downing began building race cars and racing them in 1963 and has been driving professionally since 1974.
But a racing accident in 1981 became the catalyst for development of the HANS. In a race at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, Downing's friend and fellow driver Patrick Jacquemart was killed when his car slid off the track and hit a dirt bank.
Jacquemart's death was a result of a basilar skull fracture, where the tendons and ligaments that attach to the base of the skull are torn away.
Downing was aware the cause of his friend's death wasn't an isolated incident, so he asked Hubbard what could be done about it.
Hubbard changed the course of his research and, ultimately, his future.
"My work at MSU has been primarily to understand the biomechanics of the interaction between people and seats, like office chairs and automobile seats," he said. "But after Jacquemart's death, all that shifted to product design and development."
In order to comprehend how a crash affects the body, it's important to have a fundamental understanding of human anatomy, Hubbard said.
The head is connected to the neck by tendons that come from the muscles around the neck and also by ligaments around the upper backbone.
In an auto-racing crash, the torso is restrained by a racing harness. But with nothing to hold the head in place, it snaps forward, and the tension that develops between the head and torso is transmitted through the neck.
Basilar skull fractures aren't fatal by themselves, but the resulting injuries disrupt the major blood vessels to the head, causing massive blood loss and possible death. It also can damage the spinal column or brain stem, which can be fatal.
"When Downing first recognized this as a problem, we didn't realize it's actually the most common way race-car drivers are killed," Hubbard said.
Because Hubbard had prior knowledge of the injury, he understood what had to be done to stop it - the head needed to be restrained directly above the shoulder line, reducing the tension on the neck.
"You can't have the head or torso completely held, or you'd rip the driver's head off," Hubbard said. "I came up with the idea for the HANS device to hold the head to the torso."
Hubbard began from scratch, drawing sketches at the dining room table in his East Lansing home.
Early versions of the device were made mostly of cardboard and duct tape. Hubbard decided the final version would be made primarily of carbon fiber because of its light weight and structural rigidity.
Hubbard filed for a patent in 1985, and the first one was issued in 1987. Soon after, he formed Hubbard/Downing Inc., an Atlanta-based company owned jointly with Downing.
"From the beginning, Downing was collaborating with me and trying different sizes and shapes with me, which were the precursors to the commercialized HANS device," Hubbard said.
Hubbard received a grant from the state, and by 1989 he had created a prototype that would stand up to crash-dummy testing.
Using the grant money, Hubbard tested the device on a dummy with a racing seat, harness and helmet. The tests were run with and without the HANS device and were the first dummy tests ever done in the United States for racing, Hubbard said.
"In that sense, we were a pioneer," he said.
The test results showed that in a frontal impact, the HANS could reduce loads on the neck by as much as 80 percent.
"Downing and I felt obligated to try to commercialize the thing," Hubbard said.
The first HANS device sold for $625 in 1991. Hubbard said he and Downing tried to no avail to get existing safety equipment manufacturers interested in it. He also said the device was too cumbersome to be implemented in the confined cockpits of open-wheel race cars.
Through most of the 1990s, sales of HANS devices crept along - only 250 devices were sold throughout the decade.
"At that time, we were more of a service to drivers than a business," Downing said, adding that he and Hubbard were losing money by keeping the company going.
High demand
At the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix in Imola, Italy, Roland Ratzenberger died of a basilar skull fracture. That same weekend, Formula One legend Ayrton Senna was killed at the same track.
FIA, the sanctioning body for Formula One, decided something had to be done to improve safety. By 1996, Mercedes-Benz began cooperating with FIA to develop an airbag for F1 cars.
The following year, Mercedes-Benzcame to Hubbard/Downing Inc. and asked them to develop a HANS device for Formula One. Due to the reclined seating position and tight cockpit of the Formula One cars, Mercedes-Benz needed a more compact device.
Mercedes-Benz spent $700,000 testing the HANS and helped Hubbard/Downing Inc. to create a smaller and lighter version. It performed better than any airbag they could think of. Mercedes was so confident in the HANS, they dropped the airbag project and decided to pursue implementation of the device, Downing said.
The work done with Mercedes-Benz caught the attention of safety experts at Champ Car World Series, which formerly was known as Championship Auto Racing Teams, or CART.
"We saw the safety implications of it as far as reducing driver head and neck injury," said Lee Dykstra, director of technology for Champ Car World Series. "It was obvious that it was the way to go."
But just like any other piece of safety equipment, the HANS isn't perfect. The devices often are damaged in a significant crash and need to be replaced. By Hubbard's count, five people who were wearing the HANS have been killed, though their accidents involved numerous complications that the device couldn't have saved them from.
"We're careful about what we claim it will do," Hubbard said. "We don't guarantee it will protect somebody, just that it will reduce risk of injury for the driver."
CART became the first racing organization to mandate use of the HANS in 2001. But it was the death of NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt on the final lap of the 2001 Daytona 500 that finally helped establish Hubbard/Downing Inc. and sent HANS sales soaring.
"Over the course of that week, we sold 250 devices," Downing said. "The phone never stopped ringing, and we didn't have the parts because we weren't geared up for it. It was a very hectic time."
Since Earnhardt's death, HANS device sales have increased exponentially<- of the roughly 5,500 devices sold since 1991,about 2,700 were sold last year alone. Units today sell for between $865 and $1,650, depending on the driver's size and the materials used, and its use has been made mandatory in numerous racing organizations, including NASCAR, Formula One and F1 Powerboat Racing.
There now are eight HANS models available, and the duo spends most of their time fitting the devices for different drivers and figuring out how to distribute them. Downing said the next step for Hubbard/Downing Inc. is to keep improving the HANS.
"We're just in all those kinds of growing pains trying to grow into a real business," Downing said.
Evan Rondeau can be reached at rondeau1@msu.edu.
