Designing Protective Systems and Selecting Materials for Motorsport Safety Through Biomechanical Evidence: A Scoping Review

Motorsport remains high risk despite advances in crash protection, vehicle design, and medical response. Effective injury prevention requires understanding interactions among crash loading, human injury tolerance, protective-system design, and material behavior. This scoping review searched PubMed, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, and Scopus for English-language studies from 2000 to July 2026 addressing motorsport safety, injury biomechanics, finite element analysis or modeling, protective-system design, or impact-mitigation materials. Study characteristics were charted, and evidence was narratively synthesized following scoping-review principles. Fifty-six studies were included. Injury prevention increasingly draws on head-kinematic field measurements, injury epidemiology, region-specific finite element analyses, and studies of helmets, restraints, seats, and energy-absorbing structures. The most direct evidence concerns integrated head-neck protection, restraint and seat geometry, and the use of finite-element methods to interpret local injury mechanisms. Emerging material strategies are promising but rely mainly on component-level or simulation-based evidence rather than driver-level injury outcomes. Overall, biomechanics, protective-system design, and material selection are increasingly integrated, but evidence remains uneven. Real-world injury surveillance is limited, simulation studies predominate over field outcomes, and direct evidence linking emerging materials to driver-level injury reduction remains sparse. Progress requires better surveillance datasets, stronger motorsport-specific validation, and more driver-centered protective design.