I'm not going to say that the HANS is not a better device than the Hutchens device, but I think it's a little presumptuous to conclude that Eric Medlen's fatality was due to not using a HANS device.
I can hold your head perfectly still, but if I take the steel box you're sitting in and crush it from all sides at high speed down to the size of a coffee mug, you're dead regardless of whether your head moves or not. This is obviously an over exaggeration, but unless you were part of the crash investigation team (including the police department and coroner's office), I don't think you can definitively say that Eric wasn't fatally injured because some other piece of the car came up and hit him in the head as it was disintegrating from the force of impact.
As an example, when Darrell Russell was killed, a HANS device would not have saved him. The ballistic shields that NHRA made all T/F competitors install after Darrell Russell's death behind the driver's compartment MAY have, but even that's not definitive.
I for one can't positively conclude that the HANS device is better than the Hutchens device. I like the looks of the design of the HANS device better, but until I see conclusive evidence from a neutral 3rd party (i.e. not at HANS website), I won't make any conclusions. That said, if I were going to race in T/F and was going to buy one, it would probably be the HANS.
Jason Oldfield
S/G & S/ST 1838
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