MOTORSPORT: Two decades without an F1 driver fatality

The world is remembering today the death 20 years ago of Ayrton Senna, the legendary Brazilian Formula One world champion.

Senna was the last driver to die in F1. At Imola in Italy. His Williams-Renault left the track at the Tamburello Curve at more than 300kmh and slammed into a concrete wall. A part of the suspension pierced Senna’s famous yellow helmet.

The day before the little-known Austrian Roland Ratzenberger had died in qualifying at the same circuit, driving a Simtek car like that of Australian David Brabham. Ratzenberger was travelling at more than 300kmh too, with a broken front wing, hit a concrete wall and his skull was fractured.

And the day before that the Jordan of Rubens Barrichello, a Brazilian protégé of Senna, had climbed a safety fence, luckily not going over it. (Barrichello survived to drive more than 300 F1 races, a record).

Two weeks after Imola a Sauber driven by another Austrian, Karl Wendlinger, crashed at Monaco and the Mercedes-Benz-backed contemporary of Michael Schumacher was never the same driver again.

Now Schumacher, after rewriting the F1 record books, has been in a coma for four months, although from a freak accident skiing rather than motor racing.

But those incidents in 1994 demanded major action on F1 safety, and it came.
Jackie Stewart had begun a crusade for improvements, particularly in circuit standards, more than two decades earlier.

After Senna’s death, Max Mosley, president of motorsport’s world governing body, the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), took up the cause much more vigorously, along with Professor Sid Watkins, a neurosurgeon who already had worked – at Bernie Ecclestone’s instigation – as F1’s chief medical officer since the late 1970s.

Watkins became chairman of the FIA’s expert advisory safety committee (on which Mark Webber has served in recent years) and president of the newer FIA Institute for Motor Sport Safety.

Mosley gave these bodies the freedom and the funding to do whatever research was deemed necessary.

Watkins died two years ago, but in the middle of the last decade, towards the end of his working life, he said: “In the 1960s and 1970s for every 10 accidents there was either a death or a serious injury. Now the ratio is around one in 300.”

F1 used to lose in those days, on average, at least one driver a year. Stewart, these days Sir Jackie, has recalled: “From 1968 to 1973, my big years [including three world titles, like Senna], if you raced continuously you would have had a two in three chance of dying. It was like a general hospital, a serial death program.”

The changes since 1994 have been much more than stronger cars generally but have included wheel tethers to curtail flying tyres, collapsible steering columns, synethic fuel cells instead of metal tanks, protective foam around the top of cockpits, better seat belts and protective clothing and the head and neck support device now worn obligatorily in most forms of motor sport.

While there has not been an F1 driver killed at a grand prix for two decades now and circuits as well as cars have been improved dramatically, track marshals have been lost – including Australian Graham Beveridge at Melbourne’s Albert Park in 2001.

The changes that Mosley drove through the sport, largely on Watkins’ recommendations, have had an enormous impact on car industry safety standards as well.

“That Imola weekend was the catalyst for change on the roads that has literally, without question, saved tens of thousands of lives,” said Mosley, since retired – after seedy revelations about his personal life – and replaced as FIA head by Jean Todt.

“Without that catalyst we would never have the Euro NCAP (New Car Assessment Program), the crash-testing, we wouldn’t have got the legislation through the European Commission that has upped the standards of safety,” Mosley told the Reuters news agency recently.

“Thousands of people walking around, happy, alive, uninjured would be dead if it weren’t for what was done.

“And all that started with Ayrton’s accident [which came less than six months after his final victory at the 1993 Australian GP in Adelaide].

“The reason it had such an impact was he was recognised by everybody, including the other drivers, as number one.

“We’ve done 20 years [of safety improvements], but one always has this feeling don’t tempt fate.

“You used to go to the people running the sport [as far back as the 1960s] and say, ‘It’s unnecessarily dangerous’, and they’d say, ‘Well, you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. It’s entirely voluntary’.

“I remember thinking at the time you ought to be able to do a sport without getting killed.

“You can accept a risk, but not a massive risk. It was like being in a front-line platoon in Vietnam or something.

“[By the 1990s, without a driver death in F1 for 12 years] people were beginning to think that no one gets killed, and yet it was quite obvious that it was still far more dangerous than it needed to be. It’s never safe.

“What you have to do is everything you can to reduce the probability, but you can’t make it [completely] safe.

“The really serious scientific work done by Sid could never have happened because we would never have put that committee together without the impetus of the [Senna] accident.

“And then, of course, if we had put a committee together nobody would have taken any notice.

“What would have happened if it hadn’t been for Ayrton? Ther would have been at some point in the next four or five years another fatality.

“I can think of two or three accidents that would have ended badly had it not been for the work done post-Senna. And there would have been a slow movement.

“The road safety would have happened, but it probably would have taken another 15 or 20 years.

“Meanwhile, all those thousands of people would have been killed and they are alive. And that really matters.”