Dissecting the safety cage that saved Jeremy Foley's life at Pikes Peak [w/video]

Filed under: Motorsports, Sedan, Etc., Safety, Mitsubishi, Racing



The gallery of images above "shows some insight into how a NASA cage handles 14 rollovers, a 100-foot flight down a 45-degree slope into a rock field." So says Kevin Dubois, the man behind Evolution Dynamics, the company that provided the Mitsubishi Evolution 8 for driver Jeremy Foley and co-driver Yuri to take up the mountain at Pikes Peak.

As you may already know, things didn't go quite as planned. Foley and the Evo careened off the course at Mile 16 and were air-lifted to a nearby hospital. Fortunately, neither the driver or his passenger were seriously injured in the accident, and that's due to the strength of the roll cage and the well-thought-out safety measures taken ahead of the event.

As you can see in the gallery, just about every bit of the car was damaged in the crash - even the passenger seat was ripped from the eighth-inch steel plate welded to the car's floor - but the safety cage mostly held up. Amazingly, the Evo's turbocharged engine, along with the transmission and transfer case, survived the carnage to die another day.

Want to relive the crash one more time? Scroll down to see the video.Continue reading Dissecting the safety cage that saved Jeremy Foley's life at Pikes Peak [w/video]

Dissecting the safety cage that saved Jeremy Foley's life at Pikes Peak [w/video] originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 15 Aug 2012 19:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.



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I'm honestly surprised the trans and t-case are still good. The engine sits up high enough and the stock oil pan has 1/4" steel plate welded to the bottom, but the trans and t-case are both aluminum and sit low. I wouldn't be surprised if there's small cracks in them.