The new Formula 1 Halo

‘I’m not impressed with the Formula 1 Halo, and if you gave me a chainsaw I would take it off,’ announced Toto Wolff at the Mercedes car launch earlier this year. ‘As impressive as the statistics are of the Halo withstanding the weight of a London bus on top of it, this is a Formula 1 car, whether it has a bus on top or not.’

This was the opinion of most at the beginning of the 2018 season. However, since then the Halo has proved it’s worth; protecting Tadaskue Makino from the rear tyre of Nirei Fukuzumi at the Barcelona Formula 2 round, and Charles Leclerc from Fernando Alonso’s suspension when the Spaniard was launched over Leclerc’s cockpit at the Belgium Grand Prix.

‘When you watch the video frame by frame you can see the McLaren’s suspension was broken by the contact with the Halo, so with our data and that knowledge we have estimated it took a 56kN load, which is about half of what the test load is,’ FIA race director Charlie Whiting says of the Spa incident. ‘It stood up really well and there was no distortion of the Halo. Sauber took it off the car after the crash and thoroughly checked it but there were no cracks and no buckling.’

However, the effectiveness of the Halo is still heavily criticised in situations such as Nico Hulkenberg’s recent Abu Dhabi flip, where he was ‘hanging like a cow’ for quite some time. Many thought this was due to the Halo causing issues, but Charlie Whiting later explained that the Halo did not compromise Hulkenberg’s extraction as the protocol in those circumstances is to first check the driver is OK and if so, then right the car before the driver can get out. The delay was mostly to do with the fire that had to be completely extinguished first.

Overall, the Halo does improve driver safety, which is why it will continue to feature in Formula 1, Formula 2 and now Formula E, with Formula 3 and Super Formula adopting it in 2019 and Formula 4 in 2024.

So now that the Halo has proved itself, it’s time to unearth the technology behind this device, a piece of kit which can withstand 15 times the static load of an F1 car and the impact of a 20Kg wheel at 225kph.