SPA Technique was the first company to receive the new SFI 17.3 certification for its FireSense Plus sprint car fire suppression system. While its 4 Fire suppression agent is sourced from Denmark, the rest of the system consists of components made in the US.

Beginning next season, these units will be required on all World of Outlaws sprint cars. And manufacturers are already one lap ahead with development and product solutions.

Earlier this year, the World of Outlaws announced that “by the first WoO racing event of 2023, fire suppression systems will be required on all World of Outlaws Sprint Series competitors.” The sanctioning body’s Sprint Car Safety Council worked with SFI to set up product parameters and testing requirements for what would become SFI Spec 17.3, for “Single Seat Open Wheel Front Engine On Board Fire Suppression Systems.”

Unlike the 17.1 spec, the sprint car systems focus solely on the driver. “They weren’t worried about spraying anything on the engine or the fuel tank,” explained Dan List of SPA Technique, Indianapolis, Indiana. “They just want to spray down the driver to get good fire-out and give them enough time to get the driver out of the car.”

In addition, 17.3 mandates the system must be activated either thermally or manually, and it must work regardless of the car’s orientation, in recognition of the fact that sprint cars don’t always land on their wheels after an accident.

SPA Technique was the first company to receive the new 17.3 certification for its FireSense Plus system. The spec requires a five-pound bottle of suppression agent; SPA Technique uses an agent sourced from Denmark called 4 Fire Universal. All other components for the system are sourced in the USA. With SPA’s AM block, the suppressant sprays out of the same nozzles whether the system is activated manually or thermally.

4 Fire has the same fire-out times in tests as a halon replacement like Novec, List said, but it prevents re-ignition, which can occur “once the percentage of Novec in the air is too low. Since a sprint car is more open than a sedan type of car, I was concerned that percentage could get too low too fast. And because the engine is so close to the driver, the possibility of re-ignition would be higher than a lot of other cars.”

Though SFI keeps testing results private, SPA Technique posted video of its SFI tests on YouTube. “For the two automatic tests, we had a fire-out time of 1 and 1.3 seconds (10 second maximum) and discharged 4.98 pounds of agent (4.75 pounds minimum),” List said. “For the manual activation test with the bottle upside down and an obstruction in the way, we had fire out in 3.5 seconds (10 second maximum) and discharged 4.98 pounds (3.4 pounds minimum).”

Jim Morris of Lifeline Fire & Safety Systems in Coventry, United Kingdom, said his company is “fully aware that a fire suppression system for 99.9% of racers is ballast in the car, and it does one thing: It makes you go slightly slower, it doesn’t make you go faster. So our mindset has always been, give them the best performing, lightest weight possible fire suppression system they can have.” The Zero 360 system Lifeline developed for sprint cars has been in the works for nearly a year, and when we spoke with Morris in mid-July, SFI testing was just days away.

The system consists of a 5-pound bottle filled with Novec 1230 and a nozzle attached directly to the bottle, a feature that helps it fit in the tight confines of a sprint car cockpit. “The bottle mounts just under the seat on the down tube,” explained Tyler McQuarrie of Lifeline. “The nozzle is pointed toward the area in a sprint car where 90% of the fires start—the fuel line and the fuel pump that are right under the driver’s left leg. Mounting it on the down tube takes just four Allen screws, so installation is very, very easy.”

The nozzle incorporates “valve mechanisms and some of the triggers that cross over from our traditional FIA road racing systems in terms of the compression discharge technology we use, the ability for the system to operate in any orientation,” Morris said. He described the Novec suppression agent as “a three-dimensional suppressant. It does not need sight of the fire to extinguish it, whereas a foam-based system or a water-based system absolutely has to see the fire in order for it to work.”

Lifeline has been selling the system since the beginning of the year. Lifeline’s James Clay said he was “pleasantly surprised” that “the uptake and demand for this has been tremendous, even without the homologation. People have been waiting for something to trigger an appropriate system that will fit in their car and accomplish what they want to accomplish.”

Safecraft Safety Systems of Martinez, California, has sold a sprint car system “for roughly three years,” said Johanna Higginbotham. It was “designed with sprint cars specifically in mind, with a slim, compact design crucial to making this work for our sprint car customers.” The Model SC is available in 3- and 5-pound bottles filled with Novec 1230 and capped with an activation head “that is narrower than other models we offer. This system also deploys at any orientation to accommodate race conditions. Most importantly, the thermal activation provides ultimate security for the driver if they are unable to activate the system themselves.” The Model SC is sold with “slim roll bar mounting brackets that effectively use what little space there is” in a sprint car, she added.

While the new SFI spec calls for a fire suppression system, Higginbotham said “having both an installed system and a handheld extinguisher is not uncommon. There is no such thing as too much fire suppression.”

SOURCES

Lifeline Fire & Safety Systems
lifeline-fire.com

Safecraft Safety Systems
safecraft.com

SPA Technique
spatechnique.com