In-Car Air Conditioning

[Stone Phoenix]

With Paul Morris's Sirromet team having developed, tested and opted to run an Air-Con unit in the V8 Supercar this year (Electronic mobile unit) should there become a ruling where the cars should have some form of Air-Con setup for driver health protection?

The heat gets extreme inside the cabin at the best of times and the Carbon Dioxide inside the cabin can seriously effect drivers.(Remember Paul Radisich at Adelaide a few years back) With an A/C unit the windows would be wound up and minimise gases into the cabin.

There is plenty of rules re safety. What about temperature related safety? Thoughts?

 

[Ruben]

I dont think they need to make a rule on it, if it works, as they say it will with no detrimental effects on the performance, teams will introduce it for the hotter races out of common sense, as for the RAT he could write off a car with A/c or no A/c.

 

[Henry]

Some of them could use GPS, and an automated guidance suite

The cars have always been hot, but I guess as power goes up, heat goes up (basic frictional losses and thermodynamics... and a couple of other big words I heard once), and they wouldn't be easy to ventilate either. There's a lot more concrete around race circuits these days, so it mightn't be as easy to dissipate carbon monoxide and latent ambient heat... I think if the drivers are certain that their performance, and ultimate safety are now being compromised without a/c, why not whack it in?

 

[n/a]

Airconditioning in V8 Supercars probably don't have too much effect on performance compared to normal cars.