| doesn't care about you. Join Date: Aug 2004 Location: Denver, CO Posts: 3,925 | 
And best of all, this:
Random internet findings....
Downing and his brother-in-law, Michigan State professor Robert P. Hubbard, built the Head and Neck Support device, or simply HANS.
A HANS-On Device
Race-car driver Jim Downing is in business to save lives. Jim Downing won one of the most prestigious automobile races in the world in February, but his biggest challenge — saving the lives of other race-car drivers — lies ahead.
Downing, IM 66, driving a Mazda-powered Kudzu prototype, outlasted the more established Fords, Porsches and Ferraris to win the Rolex 24 at Daytona, a twice-around-the-clock endurance race.
There were no serious accidents.
Downing worries about accidents. The 59-year-old racer says he has seen too many lives claimed in racing mishaps. He has seen old buddies like 76-year-old Jim Fitzgerald and young lions like Adam Petty and Kenny Irwin lose their lives in seemingly innocuous crashes.
"There wasn’t a scratch on them," Downing says. "Not even on their helmets. They hit the wall and it broke their necks."
Then there was the crash that killed NASCAR superstar Dale Earnhardt. Earnhardt died instantly on the final turn of the final lap of the 2001 Daytona 500 when his car slammed almost head-on into the outer retaining wall at nearly 190 mph. He suffered a basal skull fracture, a type of broken neck, when a broken lap belt caused the right side of his body to be hurled into the steering wheel. Although doctors said Earnhardt’s accident was a different kind of crash, the need for more safety devices in professional racing was hotly debated in the news media.
In response to these accidents, and his own frightening crash in the early 1980s, Downing and his brother-in-law, Michigan State professor Robert P. Hubbard, built the Head and Neck Support device, or simply HANS. It is a deceptively simple-looking thing: a rigid, collar-shaped, carbon fiber shell held onto the upper body by shoulder harnesses and fastened to the driver’s helmet with flexible nylon tethers on both sides of the helmet. It weighs a pound and a half, and because the tethers are flexible, drivers still have full movement of their heads.
Downing’s love affair with fast cars began in the 1950s as an 11-year-old racer in a Soap Box Derby. "I built a racer with the help of some of the mechanics at my father’s auto dealership."
"Those guys used to always listen to the Indy 500 and the bug just got in me. I didn’t care about being a professional driver — I just wanted to race. Back then, you couldn’t race until you were 21," he says. "I just played around with cars until I could go racing. That’s why it took me six years to get through Tech, I was fooling around with race cars."
In 1967, Downing began racing sports cars in amateur competition. He quickly ascended the ranks, driving open-wheel Formula Vee cars and lumbering American sports coupes like the Ford Mustang. In 1974, Downing decided to race professionally. He closed the doors of his auto-repair shop, bought a retiring racer’s Mazda MX-2 and joined the fledgling International Motor Sports Association. He worked out of a backyard shop for several seasons until he secured full Mazda factory backing and formed Downing/Atlanta, a name nearly synonymous with Mazda racing in the United States.
Enjoying the fruits of a full-blown budget, Downing expanded his operation and began producing the Kudzu, a $250,000, carbon-fiber prototype racing car, for sale to the public.
HANS is now mandatory in the Championship Auto Racing Teams series and will be required in Formula One next year. NASCAR is taking a closer look, although, according to Downing, it has historically not endorsed safety items in order to avoid legal liability.
"Right now, we will do a little racing, but our focus is the HANS device," he says. "It’s really far more important to do this than for me to have a personal racing program. We want to see this thing standard in every car, just like seat belts. It really does work. If everybody wore one, Adam Petty, Kenny Irwin and many others might still be alive."
The DASC is basically the same as the Mazda Miata kit he first produced, know as the Sebring Supercharger. __________________ 
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