The Legacy Motor Club is fascinated by foam.
D3O is a British company that produces a patented orange foam material that can be used in helmets, shoes, body armor, and even cell phone cases. The product can be made into many different shapes to help those struggling with shock, vibration, and fatigue, and can be used not only in sports, but also in other areas such as the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA.
It can also be found in the cockpit of the Legacy Motor Club’s Toyotas. The organization uses its ST plates (a soft, flexible and versatile material commonly used in leg, back and chest protectors) and AeroMAX (larger plates with performance properties) in the knee impact device, which is located under the steering column and is an area where the driver’s legs can move in an impact.
“There was not much going on at all,” Joey Cohen, vice president of racing operations for the Legacy Motor Club, told RACER. “The drivers were going numb – the backs of their legs were going numb, their buttocks were going numb.”
When teams moved to the next-gen car in 2022, some comfort areas in the car changed and drivers started to feel different things for the first time. For example, the pedal box is now attached to the floor of the car and the floor of the car generates a lot of heat and vibrations to the driver’s feet. In the older generation cars, the pedals were hanging from the chassis.
“From those areas, there was a much stronger connection to the driver’s body,” Cohen said. “It’s very similar to other motorsports with high frequency vibrations, and you can’t let those constant vibrations numb the nerves in the legs and lower torso. So we’re still learning.”
The partnership has already seen great progress, extending beyond the physical components used in the cars to include the sharing of information between Legacy Motor Club and D3O.
“After Erik (Jones) got hurt at Talladega, they were one of the first people to call Monday morning wanting to know more and talk about it,” Cohen said. “Some of the things they revealed to us – we looked at a slide deck of cars that run in the Dakar Rally and what their seats look like, because they’re just jumping off things and compressing their spine for thousands of miles.
“There were some really interesting elements: how they approach the spine part of the seat with the foam, how to better position yourself in the seat to absorb that kind of impact. And we talked about Formula 1 technology, because Red Bull and Ferrari both use D3O material.”
For too long, Cohen felt that teams were using the technology they developed, applying it and not asking too many questions. The Legacy Motor Club has used this partnership to learn about foam and its uses. When Jones suffered a compression fracture in his lower back in late April, they asked a lot of questions.
“But why?” Cohen said of those questions. “Why is that? And then you spend a month asking ‘why’ questions and you end up changing six or seven things. The one area that we identified very quickly — and there are some proprietary areas that we don’t discuss in as much detail — that was a concern in the next-gen car in crashes was leg movement. We now put leg braces over their legs because there was enough movement.”
The technology has been installed in the Legacy Motor Club cars all season and has been further developed from the knee impact area to the driver’s headrest. D3O can produce a variety of products in different molecular shapes.
“The interesting thing about the head restraint and head injuries is that it’s not just the first impact, it’s the second and third impact,” Cohen said. “You can see them on the cameras in the car when the driver hits the head restraint (multiple times).”
For Cohen and others, it’s been a fascinating experience not only to understand how foam reacts on impact, but also how it recovers afterward. Much of this happens in the lab, because it’s one thing to test foam while it’s sitting on a table, but quite another to evaluate it after it’s been exposed to an environment like a NASCAR race in a hot race car — and on impact.
D3O has taken foam back from Legacy Motor Club after driving many miles on it to study the data so the company can find out what can be done better and what properties of the material change over the course of the season.
Cohen believes that driver comfort is linked to performance. By optimizing certain areas of the car for the driver, any doubts about their comfort level and what might happen in an impact are removed. And that means total concentration on the job.
The Legacy Motor Club had been exploring options in driver comfort when they came across D3O, which turned out to be a cold call. It turned out the call came at the right time, as D3O was looking for a way into the NASCAR market. But Legacy didn’t just want to put a sticker on the car to get sponsorship; they wanted a real partnership.
It didn’t take long for everything to come together. Next up is integrating D3O with NASCAR’s competition division.
“D3O has a long history and track record of getting involved in these different areas and solving problems or questions related to shock absorption and anything that comes into contact with the driver,” said Cohen. “The goal of everyone in the series is to come up with ideas; safety is a never-ending journey. We obviously went through a difficult time with Erik, but we should always be looking for ways to make better decisions. We always find ways to uncover areas that could be a problem, so we’re really excited about the partnership with D3O.
“It’s cool when you find companies in motorsport that bring another aspect to it. Most motorsport companies say, ‘Hey, we can make your car faster. Hey, we’ll do this or solve this problem.’ But that was an interesting element that they brought.”
Above all, Cohen stressed that the partnership is still in its infancy. There is no telling where it might lead, but Cohen believes it will eventually go beyond the simple things he shares now.
“You don’t think foam can improve performance, and then they show you what Red Bull is doing, and you think, ‘Oh, that’s pretty interesting,'” Cohen said. “It’s almost hilarious. We say these guys drive from the gut. When you lose feeling in your lower extremities, you can’t drive the car as well and you don’t know what it’s doing. So you thought, ‘Maybe we need to improve this and really look into it.’
“It seems far-fetched. In the early stages of anything, it seems kind of silly to think about it or work on it, but there’s another, higher-level motorsport series that does that.”
