This year, the Formula 1 World Championship marks ten and thirty years since the last fatal accidents. The data shows that the series has not always been smooth sailing towards safety, and that the Grand Prix itself accounts for only a small proportion of the tragic deaths of drivers.
Brno
6:00 a.m May 1, 2024
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Family and fellow racers say goodbye to Jules Bianchi, who succumbed to injuries at the 2014 Japanese Grand Prix. It is because of this latest fatal accident that the cars are equipped with a titanium frame to protect the drivers’ heads. Two of them have since claimed that the so-called “halo” saved their lives. | Source: Reuters
Ronnie Peterson takes the wreath for the winner of the 1978 Austrian Grand Prix from around his neck and opens a bottle of champagne, which he pours over second Patrick Depailler and third Gill Villeneuve. Peterson doesn’t even have a month to live, he will kill himself in the next race. Depailler dies two years later during testing. Villeneuve lived the longest, breaking his neck less than four years later in qualifying for the 1982 Belgian Grand Prix.
It is the last podium, where three competitors met, who later found death in the cockpit of a Formula 1 car. So – perhaps the last. At least the data covering the complete almost 75-year history of the F1 World Championship would suggest so.
Their bright side: The 1980s bisects this history into two very different eras. By 1986, 42 World Championship participants had died during championship races or testing, and since 1987, three. Exactly 30 years ago, during the tragic race weekend in Imola, it was Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna. And in 2015, Jules Bianchi succumbed to the consequences of the October 2014 accident.
The darker part of the data: Formula 1 drivers are more than twice as likely to be killed in a race other than F1 Grands Prix. The 50s and 60s of the last century, full of amateur organized non-competitive races held on ordinary roads, are significantly included in these statistics. At the same time, however, it is underlined by the last fatal racing accident of a former championship participant. Justin Wilson died shortly after Bianchi as a result of a crash in the American IndyCar series.
Safer with every disaster
Formula 1 did not always and smoothly move towards higher safety. Whether we look at the absolute numbers of tragic accidents in racing and testing, or the life expectancy of those who lined up for the start, the 1960s emerge as a riskier era than the 1950s. Almost half of the drivers who entered the 1964 season had less than ten years left to live. Only then do the danger indicators begin to decrease.
“In the 1960s came the first major changes to regulations,” summarizes the website Motosport.com. “The cars got rollover protection frames, quick-escape cockpits, fire protection and fire extinguishers. Competitors had to use helmets and overalls, and straw bale barriers disappeared from the tracks.’
Danger in the stands
F1 grand prix used to be risky not only for the drivers, but also for the spectators: they watched the races closer to the track, which was not separated from the stands by fences. 15 of them died in the crash of Wolfgang von Trips at the 1961 Italian Grand Prix, four at the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix and one in the fatal accident of Gilles Villeneuve mentioned in the article in 1982. Whether this is the last such accident cannot be said due to the absence of aggregate data. Even here, however, the biggest similar tragedy occurred in another motorsport discipline – at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1955.
Straw cubes were not very effective in absorbing shocks, but they were flammable. They became fatal for Lorenzo Bandini, who burned in them at the 1967 Monaco Grand Prix. Their ban followed. A similar mechanism still works today: the organizers of individual races, and later the bosses of the entire championship, typically adjusted safety measures after an accident revealed their inadequacy.
It didn’t always have to be a fatal accident – it just had to unsettle the riders so much that they refused to continue racing. Three-time world champion Jackie Stewart became a successful campaigner for greater racing safety after a terrifying experience at the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix. He was wedged in a wrecked car for almost half an hour with petrol running down his face from a burst tank. There were no organizers around, other competitors got him from the wreckage.
“Stewart called for evacuation zones around the tracks, safer barriers and the deployment of ambulance cars along the circuits. He led a boycott of the Spa and Nürburgring races, whose organizers rejected similar measures,” writes Kristin W. Shaw in The Drive. The old track at Spa disappeared from the calendar as a result of the boycott in the early 1970s. The “Green Hell” at the Nürburgring only after Niki Lauda almost burned here in 1976.
Black weekend 30 years ago
After the 1982 season came a then-record 12-year streak in which a Grand Prix had avoided fatal injuries. It ended 30 years ago with the “black weekend” in Imola. First Roland Ratzenberger died in qualifying for the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, then three-time world champion Ayrton Senna died a day later in the race. Both accidents were like a copycat: loss of downforce in corners taken at full speed, hitting a wall, injuries incompatible with life.
As we calculated
We were based on the Ergast Grand Prix results database. For each of the 509 riders who have a date of death filled in on Wikidata, we had the Mistral language model read the Wikipedia entry and classify the circumstances of the death. We then checked the resulting table manually.
The data therefore lacks information on the deaths of those who never entered the World Cup. This applies, for example, to lower category racer María de Villota, who died in 2013 as a result of a head injury during a test drive of an F1 car. Or about the track marshals who were the fatal patrol near the accident site.
The analysis can be viewed on GitHub.
Already Ratzenberger’s accident on Saturday left the participants and spectators of the championship in shock. From Senna’s cockpit on Sunday, the rescuers took out the Austrian flag, which he wanted to honor Ratzenberger’s memory at the finish line. The death of a champion during a championship race was an unprecedented blow: Jim Clark died in a lower category race in 1968, Jochen Rindt died before the end of the season in 1970, and only a month later it was clear that he would still win the title on points.
In retrospect, however, it’s hard not to see reminders that F1 has not become a safe sport in that seemingly peaceful 12-year period. In 1986, Elio de Angelis killed himself during tests. In 1989, Philippe Streiff was also paralyzed after an accident during tests. In practice for the 1990 Spanish Grand Prix, Martin Donnelly crashed at such speed that the impact threw him from the car onto the track; he never got back behind the wheel of F1 due to injuries.
However, only two deaths in one weekend led to other drastic measures, which included a reduction in the volume (and therefore power) of the engines, a speed limit in the pits or hastily built speed bumps in problematic areas of the circuits.
I don’t want to have a halo
For the next twenty years, the F1 series excites its audience mainly because of how ugly accidents can be survived in increasingly safe cars. For example, in 2006 Robert Kubica survived a crash similar to Ratzenberger’s and Senna’s, hitting a concrete wall at full speed, only with minor injuries.
This excitement is cut short by the 2014 Japanese Grand Prix, which takes place in heavy rain and not long before dark. The marshals use a crane to tow away Adrian Sutil’s car from the escape zone. Despite the yellow flags, Jules Bianchi drives through the site too fast, leaves the track and crashes into a crane. Much of this impact is absorbed by his helmet. Diagnosis: diffuse axonal brain injury. Bianchi never wakes up from the coma, dying nine months later.
And just like that, Formula 1 cars and lower categories got the last breakthrough safety element: titanium frames protecting the drivers’ heads, the so-called halo, halo in Czech.
It was not without complaints from the riders themselves. “When you look at that car, it’s ugly. F1 cars aren’t supposed to be ugly,” The Guardian quoted Kevin Magnussen as saying. “A certain amount of danger belongs to F1,” asserted Max Verstappen. “It’s not just about design, I think it’s pointless.”
Look elsewhere
The ever-increasing emphasis on the safety of the races is also reflected in the more reverent approach of the TV broadcast management to serious accidents. The accidents of Roberto Kubica and Felipe Massa in 2006 and 2009 were replayed before the medics announced the drivers’ condition and showed their recovery live. Since the 1990s, it has been waiting until it is clear that all participants are in order. Even this is not enough for some drivers: Sebastian Vettel, for example, criticized in 2020 how many times the management repeated Romain Grosjean’s scary crash. “I know people like to watch crashes and fires because it’s exciting. But when you’re sitting in that car, it’s not so exciting.”
Their first season showed that the halo is not useless: at the start of the 2018 Belgian Grand Prix, the titanium frame prevented the chassis of Nico Hülkenberg’s flying car from hitting Charles Leclerc’s head. In subsequent years, the halo helped to survive the serious crashes of Romain Grosjean and Kuan-yu Chou without major damage. They both agreed that without the halo they would be dead.
‘It would have to be really bad luck’
Even in the halo era, however, it is dying in the highest formula categories. In the 2019 Formula 2 race, again in Belgium, Juan Manuel Correa drives at a speed of 218 kilometers per hour into the car of Antoine Hubert, who bounced off the barriers into the path of others after the accident. Correa breaks his legs and misses more than two seasons, Hubert is pronounced dead 90 minutes after the accident.
Similar vertical impacts of a fast-moving car to the side of a crashed car are dangerous by definition: the large kinetic energy in them is aimed directly at the cockpit in a place where no deformation zone can absorb it. And they are also difficult to avoid: it only takes a few seconds for the marshals to display the warning yellow flags and for the other drivers to slow down because of the yellow flags, but in the meantime the fast cars cover several hundred meters. The rider in the crashed car is at the mercy of fate for a while.
Would it automatically stop the cars in front of them remotely in the event of a collision? “That’s unrealistic,” replies David Prouza from Radiožurnál Sport. “If the drivers weren’t in control of the cars, it could do more harm than good,” he explains. And it immediately reminds that the F1 series has come a long way since the last tragic accidents. “Sometimes it seems to me that there is no safer car than a Formula 1 single-seater. The drivers are much safer in them than, for example, rally pilots. An unfortunate interplay of several circumstances would have to happen for the rider to find himself in greater danger.”
Those who avoid such bad luck can then take a look at the record of the French-Brazilian driver Herman da Silva Ramos, the still living memory of the 1956 French Grand Prix: 68 years have already passed since his last racing weekend in July.
Michal Kasparek
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