Sale of safety gear rockets after teen's speedway death

Samantha Mouat. Photo / Supplied

Neck and head restraints are being fitted into youth ministock speedway cars after the tragic death of Tauranga teenager Samantha Mouat at Easter.

The big increase in sales of the restraints leading up to the start of the new speedway season has been put down to Samantha's widely reported accident.

Although a coroner's inquest is still to be held, junior drivers have been pro-active after hearing through the sport's grapevine that Samantha died from a broken neck.

A leading campaigner to improve the sport's safety is Bernie Gillon, of the Tauranga firm Flamecrusher, which sells driver safety suits and other protective equipment.

Mr Gillon said lessons had been learned from the fatal accident at Kaikohe Speedway's Easter Stampede, despite there being no pre-season announcements from the sport's two governing bodies.

Samantha died at the Far North meeting when her ministock ploughed head-on into the track's concrete block wall.

Mr Gillon said it was simple physics that accidents were nearly always fatal if a driver using standard safety restraints hit a concrete wall head-on at 100km/h.

Luckily, that style of accident was rare, he said, but technology existed to stop it being fatal and Samhantha did not have that technology in her car.

Mr Gillon said Samantha had been no different from 95 per cent of other ministock drivers last season.

However, since the accident, a lot of families had decided to put their children in head and neck restraints.

"The trend is going the right way but it is still not enough."

The $800 to $1900 cost put a lot of people off, particularly when the cost of a ministock car might be $2000, Mr Gillon said.

Independent crash tests had proved that head and neck restraints were effective. Drivers had walked away from crashes when the forces had been much higher than in Samantha's crash.

The issue with New Zealand's stock cars was that they did not have a crumple zone. Instead of a crash pulse of 90 milliseconds, the pulse was eight to 10 milliseconds.

The problem was compounded when the driver was a young person who had not developed the skeletal frame and muscular strength of an adult, Mr Gillon said.

"They cannot absorb the shocks of an adult frame ... More stringent safety rules were needed to manage the forces put on them."

Speedway New Zealand president Peter Kuriger said its investigation into the fatal accident did not apportion blame.

However, it had given the group a "whole pile of information" to check to see if any inadequacies were included in procedures.

"A lot of the stuff is already in place but there are always things we can improve on."

The accident happened on a track licensed to the Circle Track Racing Association, not Speedway New Zealand.

Circle Track Racing spokeswoman Debbie Beadle-Taylor would not comment on whether any procedures would be changed for the new season. "We are waiting for the coroner's report to come out."

- APN