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My preliminary thought is that this is quite silly from a risk management perspective. I’m sure some one with the stats could work out the formula but based on my 20 something years watching open cockpit motor racing the likelihood (amount of races in history Vs. amount of incidents of Massa’s type) is quite low and the consequence is also low (most likely consequence, not worst case consequence) due to existing controls such as helmet, HANS etc. If putting in place further controls because of silly damage control, knee jerk reaction bureaucratic freaks only heightens the risk of other hazards… Well it’s just all gone mad over a risk that was quite low to begin with!
A lot of people blame safety people for this sort of over-the-topness, but are wrong to do so. It’s people in much higher places that know nothing about safety and risk that force safety people to come up with these things. Everyone’s always answering to someone else a little higher then themselves, and they are always asking, “so, what are we doing about this?”. This ends up going down the food chain till it rests on the shoulders of the safety person to “do something”, even if it is not really necessary for something to be done due to the inherently low risk.
All management see is there is an accident, perhaps a very public accident, something HAS to be done- we HAVE to be seen to be ATTEMPTING to improve.
This is not safety gone mad – its bureaucrats!
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