Quote:
Originally Posted by Gingers4Justice
I think the FIA is beginning to lose the plot with this.
No one wants to see anyone die, but does anyone honestly think F1 would be as popular as it is today if it was safe and risk-free?
Racing drivers know what they are doing is dangerous, and for some of them, that's even why they do it. It can seperate the drivers that drive 100% from drivers that drive at 99%.
After the above paragraph, posters will probably do the whole "fine, let's go back to the 70s then" thing at me, but that's not what I want at all. We just need some risk. Much like there's no pleasure without pain, no life without suffering....F1 will slowly become emotionless if it becomes too safe.
The whole idea of spending millions on R&D to slightly reduce the already slim chance of death of 22 drivers who are already taking risks for a living - a very large living for very small risks, I might add - seems a bit silly, particularly when there are far, far more dangerous aspects of the automotive world. I think a Formula One driver is more likely to get hurt of seriously injured when driving to the circuit in his every day roadcar. Roacars are dangerous, and they needn't be. F1 isn't even the first place to start in motor sport. Two drivers were hospitalised by moderate crashes in GT cars at Le Mans this year and you hear of far more injuries in GT cars than you do anything else. The amateurs get the raw deal with safety. FIA, spend your time and money there.
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I agree with a lot of what you say but the suggestion that you are safer in a road car than racing in F1 really won't wash.
You can't really analyse this statistically as the sample for F1 is so small. If you include all F1 racing miles from the beginning of May 1994 to the present you will get a fataility per mile figure orders of magnitude larger than the risk in a road car. If you draw the line at the end of May 1994 you will create the illusion there is zero risk. It's similar to Concorde which statistically went from the (joint) safest airliner ever built to one of the most dangerous at the moment of the Paris crash.
Looking at it from the other side (where we do have a large sample) road fatalities run at about 1.5 per 100,000,000 miles if F1 were as safe we would have one driver killed in a race every 770 years. Do you seriously think F1 is anywhere near that safe?