The Bonk Page

On November 20th, 2008, Sharka was hit from behind at freeway speeds. Sharka went away on this date. Fortunately, I did not.

This may be slightly confusing to some of you who have just read a recent blog post and saw Sharka in all his glory in a recently dated photo. I rebuilt him. That's what 90% of my blog is about. But that's skipping ahead.

In fall of 2008, I happened to be driving along the freeway on the way to work. Traffic stopped. I was at the end of the line with a good car-length or more worth of space in front of me. I put on my hazards and looked in my rearview, waiting for the next wave of traffic to come. About 30 seconds later, I saw a truck crest the hill. She didn't seem to make any attempt to slow down. I remember thinking "no." She hit me hard. The car-length+ of space in front of me went away and Sharka was pinned between two cars. I lost about 15 minutes of my life. When I came to, I was standing next to Sharka on the side of the road with my camera in my hands. I don't remember shooting any of the roadside photos. And I shot all of them 5 times in order - front, back, license plates of offending vehicles. Scary.

Sharka-the-97 had stock NA low-back seats, a Hard Dog rollbar, and SFI 45.1 rollbar padding. This combination of parts resulted in me not dying from this wreck. As you can see, the trunk went away. The damage stopped precisely where the rear legs of the rollbar connect to the frame, so I had a crush zone and a safe zone. But that rollbar would have surely killed or vegetated me without the padding installed.

With that awful low-back stock seat, my head had nowhere to go but into the rollbar. The SFI padding is hard stuff. HARD stuff. Anyone who's ever felt it in their hands knows what I'm saying. Well, when my head hit it, the padding felt like a soft pillow. It's the last thing I remember before waking up on the side of the road. The padding gave me enough protection to just give me a minor concussion via the rollbar moving toward my head at 70 mph.

What would have happened without the safe zone the rollbar provided? Maybe nothing special. Whiplash for me instead of a minor concussion and a few minutes of memory loss. Maybe the truck would have kept coming into the cabin and compromised the fuel tank. Maybe worse. Or maybe nothing at all. It is hard to speculate about what might have happened. The only thing that I know for sure: I lived through a very big freeway hit and I'm very happy about it.

I vowed to change things for the better with the next car. First on the list was ripping out those low back seats in favor of something with a real headrest. I chose Lotus Elise seats. They offer as high a headrest as the 2001+ Miata setas, but sit me lower and weigh very little. My head is nicely under the rollbar and has a bit of protection from the seatback. Still, there's a chance of hitting the bar with the crazy forces a collision can give, so I put the same SFI padding on my new rollbar that saved my life the first time. It is my hope that if I get punted on the freeway again, I'll at least not have a head injury.

PAD YOUR ROLLBARS! Hard Dog sells some great padding to go with their bars. Racer Parts Wholesale sells the stuff that saved my life. Get the good SFI stuff. You're worth it.



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