Sid Watkins had returned the helmet to Karl-Heinz Zimmermann, who managed the motorhome and team / sponsor catering for many years, at the Team Lotus motorhome that evening and it gave the chance to discuss the accident and what we should try to do.

The helmet wasn’t very pretty and with the traumatic events of the day wasn’t really something I wanted to look at.

It was split in four places…

Let’s take that statement to start : many people have zero understanding of what a helmet does, they see a flashy design painted on a space-age helmet, that’s all they see. A driver sees his image design and the comfort or otherwise i.e. if it fits well or not. He hopes it is the best and will protect him when things go wrong – and don’t be mistaken I did say WHEN things go wrong, not IF they go wrong – because you can be absolutely sure that things WILL go wrong at some time in every racing driver’s career.

So back to the four splits – a helmet has to absorb one or more impacts in order to protect the wearer. To absorb force the helmet will sustain damage, even severe damage. It needs to stay on the wearer’s head, it needs to maintain its overall integrity, but it has to break in some ways to absorb the impact forces.

If a helmet is like concrete and doesn’t break then the driver’s head inside is likely to be damaged.
This helmet was the very best in F1 at the time, an Arai GP-2, made to measure, lightweight radio speakers, frankly not much more anyone could have done at the time to protect Martin. And protect him it had.

But, could it be better?

It wasn’t the first severely damaged helmet of many makes I’d seen and I determined to see what could be done better. Different tests, different materials, what was good in the Snell test specifications of the time and what was not, what was good in the BSI test specifications of the time and what was not.

The various helmet testing standards all had good and bad bits, there were also issues of some manufacturers making helmets with thick material in test impact locations and very thin in other places.

Some manufacturers were totally incapable of making two helmets to the same weight (for supposedly for the same size and model of helmet).

It was pretty clear we could improve on what we had in 1990.

In 1991 I put initial proposals forward for a new helmet standard, I had significant help from Hiro Kimura of Arai Japan and Ferry Brouwer of Arai Europe for this. But it fell on deaf ears.

I didn’t give up and kept badgering those with the power to make changes and of course after the loss of Ayrton and Roland and with Karl in a coma in 1994 finally progress was made. A meeting in 1995 distilled the targets and the project was put out to TRL to develop.

It took far too long – 10 years – and a hugely expensive helmet resulted. The expertise of the leading helmet companies was barely used in the development of this helmet – we could have had four or more concepts, produced in a fraction of the time, and also most likely there would have been far less expensive helmets available at the end of the process, quite possibly many other useful and advanced concepts as well.

Never-the-less most top level helmets now follow the principles of what followed from what was started in 1990. Slowly many manufacturers are finding ways to improve their range of helmets and get the prices down to where club racers as well as F1 racers can all have the hope of better head protection for their racing.

Spanish Grand Prix Jerez 1990 – pt 1
Spanish Grand Prix Jerez 1990 – pt 2