Look who's talking: Paul Stanecki - Ford Motorsports Group manager of aerodynamics, testing, and special projects researching better crash testing - Interview

Automotive Industries, July, 1998 by Gerry Kobe

Nobody wants to see a wreck in auto racing, but Ford Motorsport's `Crash Guy' routinely turns misfortune into safer cars.

In the blink of an eye, a CART race car can go from a 200 mile-per-hour technological tour-de-force to a twisted pile of rubble. But before the wreck has even ground to a halt, Ford's Paul Stanecki has extracted enough data to make the next car you buy safer

A 13-year engineering veteran at Ford, Stanecki is manager of aerodynamics, testing and special projects for Ford's Motorsports group -- a 33-person effort that handles all of the company's major racing involvement worldwide.

He is currently working on a project that uses data from racing accidents to create "virtual humans" for crash-test purposes. AI talked with Stanecki in his Dearborn office.

Q. There doesn't seem to be any correlation between crashing a race car and having an accident in a minivan. Is there really a useful comparison?

A. In terms of the vehicles, no, none at all. The racing data we get is more extreme, but the important thing is developing the computer model of the driver and not trying to correlate racing data to a passenger car. It's the occupants we are interested in, and they are the same.

Q. Have you been surprised by what you've learned?

A. I've been shocked. Our team is amazed at the forces race drivers survive that we never thought they could. We had one accident that measured 136 g's. Of course, that's the force the car took, but it's still a huge amount on the driver. We never thought that was survivable.

Q. Put that 136 g's into perspective for us.

A. A space shuttle astronaut might take four g's and a fighter pilot, maybe six. But those are forces exerted over a longer period of time. In those situations, people may black out because their blood becomes too heavy for the heart to pump it up to their brain. An accident is over in 30 milliseconds, and people black out because they bruised their brain. It's a different phenomenon.

Q. Why is your information so much more valuable than what you'd get from an instrumented test dummy?

A. Even safety professionals recognize the shortcomings of a test dummy. Some time ago the government said `you will use dummies.' But they aren't good representations of the human body -- they don't even have shoulders. We don't want to rely on some metal and plastic piece that loosely represents the human body. We want a computer model of a real human body.

Q. But computer simulations of occupants already exist.

A. The first computer models didn't model a human they modeled the dummy. They had all the problems the dummy had. Our model will have a heart and spine and brain. It will react to forces the same as you would.

Q. And how do you know how a real body will react?

A. From an accident at the track we look at g-forces, trace the path of the car, look at the helmet to see where it hit, get the medical report, get the corner workers' report and the network live feed. We reconstruct the accident and use the results of the medical report to input the actual injuries. By making those two mesh, our model suffers the same injuries under the same conditions the actual driver did.

Q. Has doing this kind of work changed your outlook on life?

A. Yes, but not for the reasons you probably think. It hasn't affected how I view safety in a car at all. But we are a small group. Everybody has to stand up for themselves and defend their position. In corporate America, meetings are structured so that when VPs are at the meetings, other VPs are at the meetings and young guys don't talk -- that's how it works. Being involved in motorsports boosts confidence and awareness of other people. It's an experience you can't get elsewhere.