Thomas Randle and Brodie Kostecki both suffered heat stress during the Saturday race in Darwin, requiring medical intervention and later withdrawing from Sunday.
Randle had run the race without a working cool suit, again throwing the spotlight on reliability issues with the systems and the consequences of failure.
Although it’s unclear if this happening in Randle’s case, such failures often result in drivers having increasingly warm water in the veins of their cool shirts, exacerbating the initial failure.
“Supercars have now mandated for Perth that you have to have a way of bleeding the fluid out of the system,” Jones said in his latest BJR video explaining driver cooling.
“That will help. It won’t be heating up the water, and hopefully it’ll allow a bit more air to pass around. But the big thing is the fluid that’s in the plastic pipes won’t overheat.”
This idea isn’t unique to Supercars.
NASCAR star Tyler Reddick was seen purging the water out of his failed cool suit during a race earlier this year at Darlington, which he went on to win.
Reddick used a small pressurised canister which he was able to plug into the system while under yellow flags and bleed it out.
The new Supercars rule states cooling systems “must be fitted with a suitable mechanism capable of discharging the fluid from the cool vest if the system fails”.
Supercars has meanwhile sent advice to teams since Darwin to help ensure their cooling systems are reliable during races.
The category will black flag cars without working systems, but only if the weather forecast of 32.9 degrees is exceeded on the day and the heat policy is enacted.
Supercars allows various freedoms in its driver cooling rules, with teams split between using traditional dry ice boxes for cool suits and the electric ChillOut.
BJR is among those to use the dry ice method for both the cool suit and helmet fan.
“The ChillOut system isn’t as effective as this, it doesn’t work as well. It doesn’t freeze up, but it doesn’t get the driver as cool,” Jones said.
“We had a failure with Cam [Hill] at Darwin, but what we found was the helmet cooling was so effective that, at the end of the race, while he was more worn out than normal, he felt comfortable enough.
“I’m sure he could have driven the car the next day.”
Supercars’ latest driver cooling rule tweak is recommended for the upcoming Townsville 500 and mandatory from the following round in Perth.
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