Racing drivers wear helmets and fire resistant overalls, but it’s all a bit 1950s (Stirling Moss used to wear a cork polo helmet, with only limited success).
Today’s invention is a suit of armour for racing drivers made of carbon fibre and fitted with a cooling system, just as spacesuits are.
Every driver in eg F1 would have a custom-fitted suit, so that no team would have an advantage.
The main benefit would be that in a collision, legs and internal organs would be much less likely to be crushed.
The armour might come equipped with lugs to which a winch could be clipped to extract a driver from eg a burning vehicle much more rapidly. It could also have monitors embedded within it so that a driver’s in-race health could be more closely assessed via telemetry.
wearing a armoured suit (harnas?) is so medieval 😉
I would propose to use Drone techniques so every race car is remote operated (OK maybe as a new category in itself).
This would allow new forms for the cars e.g. 3 wheels – flatter – other distribution of weight, higher speeds and accelerations possible, no injured drivers any more (which might be part of the sensation). To create the ultimate remote car there should be lots of sensors registering every vibe etc.
I like the idea of a full size scalextric circuit…it would be cool if the crowd could use their phones to steer, so that each vehicle was driven remotely by a subset of the crowd?