ColinOConnell wrote:
In short the safety gear did its job. The Hans was fantastic and I have no problem in my neck and upper spine. I'm not sure where the V12 vertibra crush came from. I did feel the sub belt catch me. They had a hell of a time cutting the cage out, so I have a lot of confidence in cages now, I was fully protected.
If you don't care do dissect this now (or ever), no problem, but I'm curious. If you felt the sub belt "catch" you, then that means you had movement from impact until it "caught." IMHO, that's bad. That means your sub belt wasn't in the right place or wasn't properly adjusted. I've seen a lot of seat situations I didn't like because the sub belt came through the seat well in front of your crotch, which means no amount of cinching is going to ever tighten it against your body. IMHO, the sub belt should come through the seat *just* behind your crotch such that when you tighten it, it goes around the jewels and "into" your crotch area against the groin on each side. That should prevent any movement into the sub area.
Why? Because anywhere there's room for movement of the torso means it can move. The belts are there to restrict movement so that one can not experience acceleration over time in a given direction. Since accidents can involve really high accelerations of anything "loose" when the car does an almost instant deceleration, it doesn't take but an inch or two of movement to generate speed and THEN once you suddenly stop that acceleration is when you have trauma. If you are belted in tight in ALL directions then you stop when the car stops. That's why the HANS is so important now, so that your head can't accelerate very long before IT stops, too.
My somewhat educated guess here is that your sub belt wasn't quite right. At impact, the car stopped but there was a force vector in the right direction to force your body downward and through the lap belts before the sub belt caught it. That caused your body to accelerate that direction (relative to the car...you're decelerating relative to earth, obviously) until the sub belt caught you. That means your body now has inertia toward the sub belt, and when the sub belt caught it, that inertia was nearly instantaneously stopped. And the weak link in your spinal chain was apparently V12. Probably mostly because of where it was and how it was getting bent as your body levered through the lap belt.
That's all my guess from the sound of things, anyway. It could have been that you were tight to the sub belt like you need to be and you simply had a force vector so large that it squished that vertebra, too. But given your comment about "feeling" the sub belt "catch" you and given how often I've seen sub belts that I didn't feel like were properly arranged, I can't help but rule it out. And in any event, I'm not trying to pick on you for doing something "wrong" or anything...shit happens. You're gonna be okay, and all that matters now is we try to learn whatever we can from it. I could be completely off base. But I've been in a lot of "other people's cars" and seen that sub belt thing first hand, too...
--Donnie
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Colin - hope your recovery goes well!
