Grim subject --- but fascinating reading

That is a good article. Can remember who said this, but they said there were only three "true" sports. Mountain climbing, bullfighting and auto racing. That is why Racers like A.J. Foyt, Mario, Dan Gurney, and Jackie Stewart are so high on the list. They survived when racing was so much more dangerous. It is not good to lose even one racer, and great strides have been made. It is human nature I guess for some to fight the safety aspect. I know the announcers at LeMans were complaining about how long it took to reconstruct the armco barriers that were designed to give when a car hit it. There were many crashes at LeMans this year without serious injury. But the paint on the track, the wet conditions and the tree that didn't allow the barrier to flex are part of the ongoing learning process.
 
IMO it was only *semi* in English ;)

Good read though. Didn't know about some of those reasons.
 
ted@economy said:
Yeah , but ' I think ' he stole it from me in a bar in Key West ,...those were the days papa.;)
Click to expand...
He stole it from the dog that talks to me, great (x 15) grand papa dog. I know this for a fact because he told me :)
 
StandOnIt said:
That is a good article. Can remember who said this, but they said there were only three "true" sports. Mountain climbing, bullfighting and auto racing. That is why Racers like A.J. Foyt, Mario, Dan Gurney, and Jackie Stewart are so high on the list. They survived when racing was so much more dangerous. It is not good to lose even one racer, and great strides have been made. It is human nature I guess for some to fight the safety aspect. I know the announcers at LeMans were complaining about how long it took to reconstruct the armco barriers that were designed to give when a car hit it. There were many crashes at LeMans this year without serious injury. But the paint on the track, the wet conditions and the tree that didn't allow the barrier to flex are part of the ongoing learning process.
Click to expand...

I remember Stewart but I was too young to appreciate anything but his winning while he was active.
I only learned about his efforts to make gran prix racing safer in the last few years. He was a complex man, he knew the dangers very well and still went on to win. After learning about the efforts my respect for him cant be overstated.

The old Indy cars 50s, 60s, 70s were insane. The were beautiful pieces, but the crude dangers can be seen in just a routine photo. The sprints cars in the 60s with just a single roll bar, the guys that drove those cars were ...hard to describe, the danger and passion they had to race, they were everything I could imagine a driver should be.
 
At the time when Stewart raced, they had no weight limits or horsepower limits and if they had guardrails they were ridged, like hitting a brick wall. My deaths were from suspension pieces breaking because they were so light weight. Some cars actually broke in half. They tried to run Stewart off for raising hell about the unsafe conditions, but he kept racing and complaining publicly about the deaths of his fellow racing buddies and he slowly gathered other racers around him and things started changing. Weight limits and the engine reductions helped along by the gas crunch followed. Pretty interesting read. More than one driver has stated the Enzo Ferrari didn't care about driver safety and his cars head the list for fatalities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_Formula_One_accidents
 
Seems to me , in the early days of Nascar broadcasting , the networks felt that (like golf) the viewers needed an 'expert' with a British accent to make the race strategy believable . My memories of guys like Jackie , were more from Nascar broadcasts that he was thrown into.
 
Stewart didn't obviously know doctors terms for causes of death, but he did know racing should be safer than it was. Besides winning 3 Grand Prix championships, he used his notoriety and popularity and stepped out on a limb to be outspoken about it to get changes made. Here is part of his story.


During Stewart's F1 career, an F1 driver who raced for five years had a two-thirds chance of being killed in a crash.[9]
At Spa-Francorchamps in 1966, Stewart ran off the track while driving at 165 mph (266 km/h) in heavy rain, and crashed into a telephone pole and a shed before coming to rest in a farmer's outbuilding. His steering column pinned his leg, while ruptured fuel tanks emptied their contents into the ****pit. There were no track crews to extricate him, nor were proper tools available. There were no doctors or medical facilities at the track, and Stewart was put in the bed of a pickup truck, remaining there until an ambulance arrived. He was first taken to the track's first aid centre, where he waited on a stretcher, which was placed on a floor strewn with cigarette ends and other rubbish. Finally, another ambulance crew picked him up, but the ambulance driver got lost driving to a hospital in Liège. Ultimately, a private jet flew Stewart back to the UK for treatment.
After his crash at Spa, Stewart became an outspoken advocate for auto racing safety. Later, he explained, "If I have any legacy to leave the sport I hope it will be seen to be an area of safety because when I arrived in Grand Prix, racing so-called precautions and safety measures were diabolical."[10]
Stewart continued, commenting on his crash at Spa:
I lay trapped in the car for twenty-five minutes, unable to be moved. Graham and Bob Bondurant got me out using the spanners from a spectator's toolkit. There were no doctors and there was nowhere to put me. They in fact put me in the back of a van. Eventually an ambulance took me to a first aid spot near the control tower and I was left on a stretcher, on the floor, surrounded by cigarette ends. I was put into an ambulance with a police escort and the police escort lost the ambulance, and the ambulance didn't know how to get to Liège. At the time they thought I had a spinal injury. As it turned out, I wasn't seriously injured, but they didn't know that. I realised that if this was the best we had there was something sadly wrong: things wrong with the race track, the cars, the medical side, the fire-fighting, and the emergency crews. There were also grass banks that were launch pads, things you went straight into, trees that were unprotected and so on. Young people today just wouldn't understand it. It was ridiculous.​
In response, Stewart campaigned with Louis Stanley (BRM team boss) for improved emergency services and better safety barriers around race tracks. "We were racing at circuits where there were no crash barriers in front of the pits, and fuel was lying about in churns in the pit lane. A car could easily crash into the pits at any time. It was ridiculous."[11] As a stop-gap measure, Stewart hired a private doctor to be at all his races, and taped a spanner to the steering shaft of his BRM in case it would be needed again. Stewart pressed for mandatory seat belt usage and full-face helmets for drivers, and today a race without those items is unthinkable. Likewise, he pressed track owners to modernize their track, including organizing driver boycotts of races at Spa-Francorchamps in 1969, the Nürburgring in 1970, and Zandvoort in 1972 until barriers, run-off areas, fire crews, and medical facilities were improved.
Stewart's work was not appreciated by track owners, race organizers, some drivers, and members of the press. "I would have been a much more popular World Champion if I had always said what people wanted to hear. I might have been dead, but definitely more popular."[11] However, his race wins, combined with his popularity with the public and his business savvy, prevented his message from being silenced. Certainly, after his victory in the 1968 German GP at the 187-corner Nordschleife — in torrential rain, driving with a broken wrist, winning by more than four minutes — no one dared question his bravery as Stewart pushed for better safety standards.
Even though he is known as knowing the Nürburgring better than almost any other driver, he was recently quoted as saying "I never did a lap of the Nürburgring that I didn't have to do."
Today, Stewart's legacy as a safety advocate in motor racing is as great as his legacy as a race winner.

Full article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Stewart
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom