Beginning with the 2019 Indianapolis 500, all of the Dallara DW12 IndyCar bodies will include the Advanced Frontal Protection device, or AFP for short.
The AFP is a roughly trapezoidal, three-inch-tall, three-quarters-of-an-inch wide piece of titanium mounted on the centerline of the car, directly in front of the driver. It is meant to deflect debris away from the driver’s head.
Clearly this will be some increased protection against some kinds of debris, but anything on an unfavorable trajectory will remain a problem. It’s hard to see this doing much about a detached wheel arriving at 200 mph, for example.
The IndyCar article indicates that a halo could not be fitted to the current chassis, and that there were problems with the windscreen prototype during testing at the PPG facility here in Huntsville. So it sounds like this is a stopgap.
I have christened it The Nubbin.
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