It's been suggested a couple of times around this site. I believe vaguely that the consensus (if ever there was one) of the posters was that the evident lack of teams using HUDS shows you how darn heavy those helmets already are when you're under 4 Gs. I mean, without HUDs.
You have to think that with HUDS the necks of F1 drivers would be as thick as the one of a walrus.
You know, engineering is all about balance. On one side, chaos, on the other side, nothingness...
A display in the drivers helmet would weigh almost nothing, especially if you made it a cut down version of what they already use. The reason they don't have one is that it's not necessary. It may also be illegal, as all the teams are made to use the same MESL display.
The drivers are so low in their chassis nowadays, they barely look over their steering wheel (which has the primary data on top of it)... it doesn't get much more "Heads Up" than that.
Just pondering this one, and while I am sure it would be outlawed in a flash, it would be road relevant...
How about if the HUD was not for instrument reading, but instead was fed with a radar image of the track in front of the car? That way, the drivers in spray could flick a switch and instantly get a view through the mist. Granted, they would still be grip limited, but they would be less likely to pile into one another, and they might even be able to overtake easier?
On the main question, I doubt that the weight issue would be significant. They've run with heaters on their visors, and I expect the smarts for a HUD would be lighter than that. They wouldn't even need a backlight as such, so could have LCD mounted directly in the plastic of the visor. That would be cool, if a little distracting for the drivers.
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I remember reading Ferrari had a HUD system when data could be sent from the pits to the cars. Shumi could see the racing line and breaking point of his fastest lap. Kind of like Forza.
I believe that the first attempt at using an HUD in F1 was in 1994 with Johnny Herbert's Lotus. I saw some footage on Children's TV (I believe it was on Record breakers, going for the Brands Hatch lap record) and then on Tomorrow's World.
The HUD itself was a simplistic arrangement of LEDs reflected through an an angled semi transparent mirror, displaying progress through the rev change to indicate the best time for changing gear. I remember that it was abandoned because it caused visibility problems when the driver was shifting focus from outside the car to inside the visor; continually switching between extremes of your focal range was distracting and brought no real performance advantage.
Technology has improved now and it is likely that much better units could be incorporated into helmets without massively increasing their weight, however it remains to be seen whether this would translate directly into performance on track.
"Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine ..."
