Buy tickets<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cI was a bit confused at first, because it smelt a bit different to what it normally does when it first turns on.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then within two seconds I was really struggling for breath, I was feeling like I was suffocating and really trying to work out what was going on.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know why, just natural instinct, I pulled the helmet air off and that made it a bit better.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen that happened it was quite frightening but once I got in the car and started racing I forgot about it, as you always do.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce the adrenaline wore off at the end of the race I became short of breath and really struggled.<\/p>\n
\u201cI asked a few of the guys around me and they took me off to good old Dr Carl and he was pretty concerned.<\/p>\n
\u201cStraight away once I told him he took me into the ambulance and pumped me full of full oxygen.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe last few days I\u2019ve been hyperbaric chambers filling my body with as much oxygen as I can just to make sure there are no health concerns moving forward.\u201d<\/p>\n
The last high-profile case of dry ice fumes affecting a driver was the 2019 Bathurst 1000, when Brodie Kostecki was forced to pull over on the warm-up lap on his Great Race debut when his helmet filled with carbon dioxide.<\/p>\n
Driver welfare was a big talking point over this year\u2019s Darwin weekend with both Kostecki and Thomas Randle missing Sunday\u2019s race due to health complaints.<\/p>\n
The Randle case was specifically related to driver cooling, the Tickford driver left with heat exhaustion after his cool suit failed on the warm-up lap of Saturday\u2019s race.<\/p>\n
Revised driver cooling rules introduced ahead of Darwin require drivers to have an operating cool suit and helmet fan if the forecast exceeds 32.9 degrees celsius.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kai Allen suffered a dangerous helmet air malfunction in Darwin. Image: Supplied The Grove Racing driver revealed on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":790634,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,101817,160567,806,805,803,804,9910,85],"class_list":["post-790633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-grove-racing","tag-kai-allen","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-slot2","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=790633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790633\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/790634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=790633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=790633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=790633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\u2018Suffocating\u2019:](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/026-Allen-EV06-26-MH7_6849.jpg\")