[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]

BMW Club Crash Data and Analysis

Well I guess it is time for me to sign back on to the Digest for a 
while, since all these FLAMES re crashes in Driver Schools are going 
back and forth. 

I have attached a copy of my analysis of the 3 years of Incident 
Reporting that BMW-HQ received from the Chapters. There a bit more 
than this in my report and the bar charts are not shown here due to the venue, 
but let me mension out a few of the high points:

1. There appears to me significant non-reporting and that changes my 
results significantly. I say there is non-reporting because it just 
looks that way to me, I have not proof and do not mean to imply that 
Chapter that had no crashes occur in 1993-5 were anything but 
truthful. I did not do this to stand in anybody's judgement.

2. There real bottom line is track-days/incident (see talble) The Club average is 
about 4.5 and if there really is significant under-reporting then 
that number is wrong and is not pessimistic enough. My intuition 
tells me that the real Club average is a bit lower than 4.5. Note that this figure of 
merit is such that the larger the number the more SAFE the event. 
Conversely, the closer to zero the more the risk it shows.

3. This year after 6 track-days the NY Chapter experinced one Incident 
so we are way above the 1994-1995 Club average of 4.5 
track-days/incident. We run very safe events (far from perfect) and 
we take this stuff real serious.

4. The 6 track-days/incident for NY includes two Friday 
invititaton-only Adavance Practice Days. These events are run as an 
open track. We have actually done 3 of these the first was in 1995. 
We've logged about 30,000 track-miles with NO Incidents.

So, yes we had a car crash at out school and yes we are very disappointed it 
happened, but the level of risk in these events is not small and this 
kind of thing happends. People need to have their eyes wide open when 
they bring their everyday car to a race track. I do everthing I know 
how to minimize the risk and tell folks about it up front, but the 
risk can never be eliminated. The question really is what is 
accetable risk? We all answer that question differently.

Steve Musolino
Driver School Coordinator