F1 Fanatic

I haven’t seen any F1 drivers die live (only 2 died since after I was born), but I saw the Henry Surtees crash in Brands Hatch where he died last year.

It was a great rain race, until Jack Clarke crashed, with his tyre returning to the track and hitting Surtees’ head. He went straight on at the next turn, which I thought was because of broken front wing (at that moment I had no idea it hit him in the head). Then he just kept pushing the throttle and it was that moment I realised he’s probably unconscious. I knew it was very bad and that his career just might be over, but I didn’t think of him dying.

I got the information few hours after the race and I was very shocked and surprised, and of course very very sad by the loss of such a young racer (around 18 I think), and very talented as well – he scored his first F2 podium just a day before.

Here’s a great article about it by Martin Brundle, who was there with John Surtees (as both their sons were racing in F2). http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/formula_1/article6727505.ece

There have been a few cases where I’ve seen a crash happen live and it’s occurred to me that the driver might have been killed. Ernesto Viso’s GP2 crash at Magny Cours three years ago and Katherine Legge’s at Road America in Champ Car the year before are the two that spring to mind.

And, well, it’s a horrible feeling – you’re watching something terrible unfold before you and you’d like it to stop, but just getting up and turning off the TV isn’t going to fix it, you have to keep watching.

Of course if you’re actually at the circuit it’s even worse. At Oulton Park a few years ago my brother and I were watching a British GT race when the red flags came out and we saw a rising plume of smoke above part of the track that was out of sight. It turned out a car had cleared the barrier and burst into flames. The driver survived, but he jumped out of the cockpit on fire and had to roll around on the ground.

It’s the unusual-looking ones that worry you: Viso’s because he cleared the crash barrier, Legge’s for the sheer violence of it. Crashes like that have a sinister quality to them – I felt the same watching the huge crash at Monza in 2000 where, of course, a marshal was killed.

The only positive thing is that it keeps getting less and less frequent. Hopefully it will continue to.

I have never seen a racecar crash, in a way where I was worried for the drivers life more than 5 seconds. When you see a crash like Liuzzi/Schumacher, you think about the dangers of motor racing. Also seeing Webber in Valencia, I got worried because the car didnt seem to take the impact, which means all the force goes through the driver. Luckily nothing happened.

I have though seen a drunken man drive his car over the side of the road fly through a row of trees and rolling his car 6 or 7 times. The thoughts that went through my mind when I saw it, was not: “I have just seen someone die”. Your brain instantly overclocks itself, and you take more descisions in those 30 seconds from pulling over until you are at his car, than you do in a whole day of trivial pursuit. I am lucky enough to have received a lot of training in first aid, so I knew exactly what to do. The only problem is that I didnt know what to do when the ambulance arrived and I had been questioned. I never learned that, and that was where I began to think about what happened. At the time the paramedics could not tell whether he was going to survive, so it was hard to go home and sleep.
That experience I will never forget, and I can still see the car roll, for what seemed an eternity. Luckily the man survived with bruises and some broken vertabraes, he has since thanked me and my dad for our effort, but I still sometimes think about that accident and feel sick.

I was at the Clipsal 500 on the Adelaide Street Circuit when Ashley Cooper, competing in one of the support races, was involved in an accident and later died in hospital. He hit the outside wall in the kink at the end of the main straight at about 220km/h. I was at the opposite end of the circuit and didn’t see a replay of the accident for several hours, but I was listening to the circuit commentary and I remember how they were saying that it was a relatively minor accident at first, before realising that it was more serious as removing him from the car took longer than usual.

The following day when he was still in a coma, there was a minutes silence for him, with some of the commentators becoming emotional as they knew he had no chance of surviving. His life support was turned off the following day, 2 days after the accident. It really hit me just how dangerous motorsport is. It had been my first ever event that I had been to and someone was killed.

I’ve felt the same kind of feelings a few time since watching on TV like when Massa was hit by the spring in Hungary last year or more recently like at the start of this years Bathurst 1000 when Fabian Coulthard had a massive crash, or last weekend at Sandown when both the Saturday and Sunday races were Red flagged due to high speed accidents. Luckily none of these were fatal and the drivers walked away from them.

All I can say I hope I don’t have to experience anything like that again.

For those that are interested, these are the accidents I was refering to:

Coulthards at Bathurst: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1akGw5JGqQ&feature=related
Tanders on the Saturday at Sandown: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V-n9GXfbfg
Davison/Caruso Crash on the Sunday at Sandown: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMP5fOuQ12A

The only time I’ve come close was Schumacher’s crash in 1999. It felt like ages before anything in the way of removing him or the car happened. I wasn’t too concerned but the commentators keep saying things like “this is just like Senna [with the protective sheets screening the view]” and at that time Senna was just a name to me but I knew he had died in a race and it was only then I was worried. But then he waved to the crowd and cameras on the stretcher and the worst was over.

I didn’t feel too worried at Massa’s accident because we didn’t know the cause for a while. I thought he’d just crashed and was being still so as not to aggravate any injury.

It’s a testament to the cars that when I saw Kubica crash I knew he’d be all right and the same with Webber this year.

I saw Senna’s crash live in 1994, when i was 6. At the beginning, I thought it was a quite innocent accident, but then I started worrying when i understood he made no movement at all. At the time, I wasn’t an F1 avid follower (i was only a little child), but Senna was a sort of hero because my older cousins supported him and I had a Sega Master System game where he was the strongest rival. I felt very sad that day, and my father still remembers that when we heard he died, i said “he’ll always be the best”.
In 2001 I also saw live the nearly fatal accident of Zanardi on television. If you see the images, you can’t believe he’s still alive. It’s like you’re in a car on the railroad and a TGV strikes you when it’s at top speed.

I think more ought to be said for the marshal fatalities, particularly the two most recents incidents at Monza 2000 and Melbourne 2001. We keep hearing that there have not been any fatalities in F1 since 1994… what, don’t marshals count? They’re human beings too. In my opinion, they are even more tragic than seeing a driver die: family men volunteering to do something, whose deaths are forgotten relatively quickly.

And fortunately I’ve never seen a driver die live, but I did get a huge fright when Robert Kubica crashed at Montreal 2007. It was such a horrific crash that for a few minutes I was convinced he was dead