Central European Drag Racing News

Thursday May 27th - 2010

Krivan gets into safety.

Regular readers will remember a recent article we posted here on cedrag about the huge costs involved in order to comply with the safety regulations necessary to enable a racer to compete in one of the car classes at any FIA European Championship events as the series tours around Europe. It is already expensive to buy the necessary oil pan daipers, blower restraints, transmission blankets and all the other things you need to protect yourself and to be able to compete. It is worthwhile repeating here that all of these things arose from lessons learnt after accidents in the past and are therefore necessary to keep racers as safe as is practicable, not just from their own equipment but also from the car in the other lane!

The OEM (original equipment manufacturer) has the responsibility to certify that their products meet the safety standards set down by the SFI and it is also their responsibility to re-certify the equipment they have already sold. This means that, yearly or every two years, racers must send the equipment they've already bought, back to the OEM for re-certification in order to prove that it is still up to the job for which it was designed.

That's a reasonable thing to do ... if you live in the same country as the OEM which, for heavy-duty race cars, means 90% of it goes back to the USA. So European racers must ship their stuff to and fro between Europe and the USA in order to maintain the certification which will allow them to race. As you can see, the costs involved are huge and are doubtless the reason that so many would-be serious racers decide not to join our sport for fear of using most of their budget on re-certification. It also means that people who will race anyway, no matter what the safety rules are, will join up with the various groups who are regarded as "outlaws" and who have no third party insurance because they lack the necessary certification. To put that into perspective, we are talking about 95% of the racers in our region.

Clearly this is a situation which should not continue, the risks taken by racers, promoters and spectators means that, sooner or later, a serious accident will occur and everyone will end up in court. With no recognised safety system in place, it is not difficult to see who will have to pay court costs and damages. For this reason, we at cedrag.com welcome any development which will help our serious racers move to a position where their equipment is up to par and they have the protection of a certification process to ensure they are taking all practical steps to race safely. One such development (You got there in the end! - Ed) is the arrival in Europe of DJ Safety - an American company who's safety equipment is SFI approved but who also embarking on the long and difficult road to gain the some of the required rights to re-certify at least some of the equipment used by European racers.

This is excellent news for all the racers in Europe, from Top Fuel "millionaires" through to bracket racers ... everybody! If your safety equipment is supplied by DJ Safety, then the re-certification process will be a much simplified affair. It gets better.... So who would be the perfect person to head up the European operation for DJ Safety? That would need to be someone who knows about drag racing, someone with many years of experience and someone who knows the feeling of missing out on race events at times due to the sheer financial drain of re-certification.... That person is Dez Krivan.

Dez has been running Top Methanol funny cars for many years and, occasionally, he hasn't raced due to lack of funds and out-dated certificates. He told cedrag about a spare clutch bell-housing which was certified as safe and sat in his workshop as a back-up. Just sitting there, the certificate expired and now, still unused, he must send it to the USA to get another sticker! It is madness.

Formally, Dez has launched DJ Safety (Europe) although he is a fair way from being fully operational and even further away from gaining significant re-certification rights, that is the long-term goal of DJ Safety (Europe). His launch material included this message...

DJ Safety (Europe) is owned and managed by Dez Krivan. It provides European racers with a new source for their safety equipment needs! This already includes filling, refilling and the re-certification of DJ Safety fire extinguishers. In addition, we are currently working towards the supply of a wide range of re-certification services from our workshops in Switzerland!
For more information, go to www.djsafety.eu

DJ Safety (Europe)- Services:

Alongside the new online shop, we are able to offer a full workshop capable of catering for all your requirements. In addition, we can also re-certify some products without the need to ship them to America through our local (European based) customer service and support center.

Contact Dez Krivan, the owner and driver of the Krivan Drag-Racing Top Methanol Funny Car who, through his extensive motor racing experience, will be able to provide more information and advice to assist you with all your safety equipment needs. Email: dez@djsafety.eu

We have probably said enough at this stage, there is a lot of information here to digest so we will leave this subject at this point and return to it once DJ Safety (Europe) has it's website running and when we understand more of the detail. It is also worth noting that Andy Robinson Race Cars have also been awarded re-certification rights for certain equipment, the only European to based racer to have those rights (unless you know different?).

On a personal note, I used to be part of a Top Methanol team in the UK and got to know Dez as we travelled around the European tracks. From that knowledge, I am happy and pleased to be able to say that throughout that time, Dez was known to everyone as a straight talking, honest and decent guy. For this reason, I am excited to see that it is Dez who is heading up this development and I have the confidence that, in the future, he will make life so much easier for serious central European racers. We won't be seeing overnight changes but this project will add and help with all the other things being done by good people around central Europe to achieve the goals we all share.