Cav's Place

Grosjean’s crash sure proved the utterly insane safety of Formula 1 once again. Of course, the fact that the car broke in half and basically exploded, creating that fireball, can be seen as a problem, but for a crash like that, there may be no feasible way to be certain to prevent something like this. And it is the first accident that seemed so dangerous for the driver since Bianchi’s crash, six years ago, while at the same time being likely to have had a similar outcome, the death possibly being instant, even by decapitation, without the halo, which split the barrier even if it then ended up stuck in it.
I’m still bothered by the fact that some safety measures unnecessarily lower performance, what makes it worse being that it’s the regulations that cause that, the teams being likely to manage to compensate for the added weight and aerodynamic impact but not being allowed to. And you also have the external safety measures, those having to do with circuit design, getting rid of gravel traps and moving barriers farther, making going off the track less and less of a problem, causing all those discussions about track limits. Those are things that really shouldn’t happen when that negative impact on racing is entirely preventable, and even more so when all other reasons for reduced performance need to be eliminated in order to allow for the measures that need to be taken in order to lower the negative environmental impact… But instead, those are not only not implemented, but even some of the existing ones, such as fuel consumption limits or energy recovery, are being relaxed.
Still, this is just a quick post about today’s crash, mainly here just to have an easy second post of the week, so I won’t write much more about it. I’m glad Grosjean made it out of that, but I’m also worried that even more security measures will be added in a rushed and misguided way as a result of this crash, which will possibly lower the chances of adding limitations for environmental reasons even further. Not that there’s any realistic way to actually make such racing not have a massive negative environmental impact, of course, but there are ways to make use of it in order to send a message, like Formula E does, so if so much effort is put into safety even if there’s no way to make racing completely safe, doing everything to go as much of the way towards that as possible and even come up with some safety measures that will then make their way to road cars, the environmental aspect should be offered at least a similar amount of attention, if not an even greater one at this point.