NASCAR Cup Series driver and team owner Brad Keselowski revealed that behind-the-scenes work was underway to resolve an issue that could be dangerous for drivers.
Cool suits were a (*ahem*) hot topic during the race at COTA earlier this month, with a number of drivers breaking down during the race – leading to at least one of them being carried on a stretcher to the field care center for a checkup after the checkered flag.
Keselowski, co-owner RFK Racing in addition to driving the team’s No. 6 car, has since spoken about an instance where his suit failed, saying that cooling jackets are not designed to “fail safely,” meaning that when they go bad…they go really bad.
Cold suits are supposed to be liquid cooled, but that means that when the water in the tubes isn’t cooled, it gets hotter and hotter, putting the driver in a worse situation than if they didn’t have a cooling shirt at all.
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Keselowski: Devastating when cool combinations fail
The former Cup Series champion revealed that there was something in the works to address the notoriously unreliable hardware, but nothing had yet been found to completely resolve the issues.
He said: “Our group, we let the teams have that autonomy on what they want to race, so if the driver wants to wear a cool jersey, he wears a cool jersey and we try to provide the technical support necessary to make sure there’s no problem.
“I had one last year where we probably didn’t do a good enough job with it and we came back and buttoned it up. Cool costumes are a difficult thing because they’re not designed in our environment to fail, so when they fail, it’s pretty devastating and sometimes these things will happen.
“It’s unfortunate when this happens to anyone, not just our team. There’s a solution that all the different teams are working on, but nothing seems to have been foolproof yet. That’s one of the nuances of the current Cup Series race.”
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