A few years ago I was involved in a very minor shunt where a driver behind failed to stop in time. The damage to my car was minimal, basically just a cracked bumper but I suffered from some whiplash that lasted on and off for about 6 months. So why should I have suffered this when you see these people banger racing bumping the living daylights out of each other and presumably to no ill effect? Maybe it's something to do with the fact that I wasn't expecting someone to hit my car whereas banger racing you prepare yourself for the impact.
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Was your head restraint adjusted properly? Some government survey found 9 out of 10 drivers have it too low, and as such offers little protection against whiplash. They also found that certain cars had head restraints that didn't "lock" into position in terms of angle, i.e. if you twist it further towards the back of your head, in an accident it might actually twist back, if your head hits it.
The people banger racing have racing harnesses and usually have crash helmets on. Two things you didn't have when driving a car out on the street.
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Racing drivers are strapped in (very tight) with a full harness. The body is not slack or slumped forward so has less movement. They have a head restraint not far away (if at all) from the head, and most wear a neck brace - or of course the now increasingly common hans device.
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TourVanMan TM < Ex RF >
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every banger racer i know from my younger days is now a walking mess,so you dont come out unscathed,
i only know 2 mind.
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A helmet might actually make whiplash worse, though, as the weight of the helmet will increase the kinetic energy of the lump above the neck.
It's the KE that causes the whiplash, and as KE=0.5 x(MassxVelocity)squared, then a small increase in mass will have a greater effect on the KE.
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Please forgive the pedantry local yokel, but, your brackets are in slightly the wrong place.
KE = 0.5 * mass * (Velocity ^ 2)
i.e. the mass doesn't get squared. Increases in velocity give much larger increases in KE, pro rata, than increases in mass.
Sorry about the pedantry...
Number_Cruncher
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For some info on relating the severity of a crash to the severity of injury, see;
tinyurl.com/k4554
I remember an ex-colleague attempting to write some code to calculate HIC value within a reasonable computation time, using long streams of data from the accelerometers in a dummy's head - I particularly remember the language he was using as he struggled with it! :-)
Number_Cruncher
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These sums are all too complicated for me, I will just take care on the roads :-)
I don't think I had the headrest correctly positioned, I think that may have been the problem. VW's have tough bumpers though.
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Next time you sit in your car, adjust your head restraints to the correct position for your head!!!
Whiplash injury normally occurs in rear end motor collisions, but may also result from front end or sideways crashes. One study of collisions showed that 43 per cent were rear end, 32 per cent were head-on, and 35 per cent were side-on or another type.
Although seat belts will prevent serious crash injuries, they may actually increase the likelihood of neck sprains. The use of head restraints may prevent whiplash, but this is debatable, and their lack of effect could be due to lack of adjustability or inappropriate design. Between 75 per cent and 90 per cent of head restraints are incorrectly adjusted, most being in the fully down position.
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Next time you sit in your car, adjust your head restraints to the correct position for your head!!! Whiplash injury normally occurs in rear end motor collisions, but may also result from front end or sideways crashes. One study of collisions showed that 43 per cent were rear end, 32 per cent were head-on, and 35 per cent were side-on or another type.
Side to side head motion is much more damaging - bigger chance of shearing critical arteries. Then again any side impact is more deadly anyway...
Many headrests are a devil to adjust, it is problem when hiring many different cars.
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A frontal accident is much more dangerous for neck problems. There is a sympton called a basal skull fracture. The head goes forward, the neck hyper extends and the rear base of the skull fractures with instant fatal effects.
Its what killed several Nascar drivers (Dale Earnardt) who hit the wall hard,
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TourVanMan TM < Ex RF >
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