Phenomenal progress has been made in Formula One safety since that tragic weekend at Imola 20 years ago when the sport experienced its last driver tragedy.
Crash tests have become stricter, the roll-over bar above a driver’s head heightened, and wheels are now attached to the chassis by tethers to name but a few safety innovations to have been introduced to the sport in the past two decades.
The fact the sport has experienced a myriad of horrific-seeming accidents in that period time only to see the drivers in question walk away generally unscathed shows the gargantuan strides that have been made.
Sadly, that was not the case with Jules Bianchi, who suffered a freak accident at yesterday’s Japanese Grand Prix.
On turn seven, Adrian Sutil’s car had come off the track in the wet conditions. As a rescue vehicle was dealing with removing Sutil’s Sauber, Bianchi spun at the same point and hit the recovery vehicle side on.
Photos of his crumpled Marussia appeared soon after with, perhaps most disturbingly of all, the roll bar of the car looking damaged.
Reports emerged he had left the track and was operated for a “severe head injury” but his surgery had finished by about 23:00 Japanese time, with positive reports that he was not on life support.
Quite what the future holds for Bianchi remains uncertain but what was clear was the effect his horrific accident had on a muted paddock at Suzuka.
Could the accident of been avoided? Yes, quite possibly. There is an argument the recovery vehicle should not have been there, that as Sutil had already spun off at that point in the race then the likelihood was another driver could come off at exactly the same point with, as it transpired, devastating effect.
It had echoes of the 1994 season and the same race at the same circuit when Gianni Morbidelli spun off in his Footwork-Ford only for Martin Brundle, commentating on yesterday’s race as it happened for Sky Sports, follow suit moments later. Brundle talked of the incident in the wake of Bianchi’s own crash as “the moment I almost lost my life”, the Briton fortunate to avoid the recovery vehicle, although he did injure a marshal.
In this instance, the marshals were simply doing their job correctly.
The bigger issue is whether the race should have been running at all at that point. In his post-race interview, Felipe Massa, who later went to Mie Hospital to be with Bianchi, said he had been shouting down the race radio for the attention of race director Charlie Whiting to halt the race.
To his credit, Whiting had done his utmost to ensure driver safety. He had pushed race officials to run the event earlier in the day when the weather was better but it is thought that request was turned down.
As an interesting aside, Sutil admitted that he and other drivers had not even been consulted about potentially shifting the race time.
Whiting warned the race could then be scrapped altogether but it eventually started behind the safety car and, when it did get under way, the truth is it probably would have been safe to do so a few laps earlier.
Suzuka is a track that has had its fair share of rain and the cambers there are such that water does not deposit on the circuit as much as a lot of other circuits, thereby reducing the threat of aquaplaning.
Even so, Whiting red flagged the race almost immediately after that. Was it too little too late?
That will become clearer in the ensuing days but it appears he tried to ensure as much safety as possible and, while the fading light was talked about as a factor, I don’t think it had become too dark to drive.
Now is not really the time for recriminations as a driver potentially fights for his life or, at the very least, his future health and well being. What happened was a truly freak accident and, like any accident, things could always have been done differently.
But the reality is that F1 is and always will be a dangerous sport.
It was an accident that was impossible to predict. Whatever the outcome, the sport will learn from it as it does from every such incident. One only hopes the outcome proves a positive one for Bianchi.
