Grand Prix - The Killer Years

What a moving video. Those were brutal times with drivers dieing at a terrible rate. Thank God things have gotten better. Even so they still risk it all when taking to the track. Brave folks for sure. Watching Monaco yesterday really shows how far driver safety has come.

Thanks for posting that Nathan.

 

Watched that a few days ago when it hit AutoBlog. It's absolutely incredible, and horrible.

 

That was very good. Thinking back, I can remember those years and it was not just Grand Prix. Deaths were common place in stock car racing, down hill skiing, ski jumping, bobsled and on and on.

Someone here said, that back then we thought we had the safest equipment available and were doing it the best way possible, which was true. I guess we excepted death as a common part of the game back then. Really odd when you think back on it.

Jim

 

Thanks Nathan.

I was by that time already into racing and can remember a lot of those early incidents. Never really hit home until I got a bit older of course.

 

Thank you Nathan – That was an excellent piece. I graduated from high school in 1968 and all those people were my heroes. Every month I could not wait to get my Road & Track and Car & Driver. Rob Walker of the Scotch whiskey family was an entrant and wrote for Road & Track. He always had the best stories about what happened at a particular race. I remember the loss I felt when Jim Clark was killed; I think that was the first time I felt a loss like that. Jacky Stuart really did get the Europeans to focus on improving the safety, without his efforts I do not believe racing would have continued in Europe. Remember what happened at Le Mans in 1955 or Monza in 1959. After the crash and fires at the start of the 1964 Indy 500 and the death of Fireball Roberts in a fire, the Companies involved with racing started the push here. Goodyear introduced their aircraft sealing tank bladders (fuel cells) was one of the first. A guy who worked for Cotton Owens nick named Pops invented the roll over valve, and as long as he was alive every car competing in NASCAR had one of his valves. The film gives the statistics about living through a life as a Grand Prix driver. In the 1950s the way to Indy was through sprint cars, and the best places to be seen by Indy car owners were the asphalt tracks of Winchester and Salem. Lots of drivers got into Indy cars because of success on the high banks of Winchester Parnelli Jones and Sara Fisher among them. In one night of racing at Winchester four people got killed in four separate accidents, and it did not stop the races.

 

That was an amazing and tragic time for racing. The Lotus 49 is still one of the best looking race cars of all time. It was a shame it came at such a cost. The last clip of the driver trying to put that fire out was heartbreaking.

My racing heroes were Derek Bell and Al Holbert and I know the loss I felt when Holbert died, in a stupid plane crash nonetheless... Between him, a friend who used to racing vintage Jags who was killed in a crash at Moroso, another driver at Sebring who crashed heavily into the wall at turn 1 after suffering a heart attack, Jim Fitzgerald, and then Senna. The last race I went to was the one at Road Atlanta where Jeremy Dale hit Fabrizzio Barbazza. I had gotten to know Jeremy while I was working Skip Barber races and schools and he was a "pop in" instructor when I took my driving school with them. I designed t-shirts for the Nissan team while he was driving for them. When he got hurt so badly that it ended his career, I just stopped watching and going to anything involving races. I simply hated that feeling of loss and helplessness.

I can imagine losing Clark was the same for a lot of people.

 

I don't know if anyone watched the Monaco qualifiers, but you can see them here:

Watch Videos Online | 2011 Monaco Grand Prix Qualifying Live.avi | Veoh.com

At about 1:02:24 Sergio Perez has his crash (he's OK) and the attitude is so different from what we saw in Deadly Years. The race stops, the drivers go to the pits, there are dozens of people on hand to help him, an ambulance is there rapidly, the barrier stops him, and there's no fire.

I have a feeling that if that had happened in the 60's, we'd be mourning his loss.

 

We have always been lucky in this country about corner workers. The SCCA might do a lot of things wrong, but they do a great job training corner workers. What happened at the end of that film would never happen here, and we have the SCCA to thank for that. NASCAR even uses SCCA trained people. It is unfortunate but true that we don’t improve the safety of racing until someone gets killed. I was reading the Wall Street Journal this morning, and they had a piece on cars that were successful at Le Mans. One of the pictures was of a 917. They quoted from the Steve McQueen movie Le Mans where McQueen drove a 917. “When you are racing it’s life. Anything that happens before or after is just waiting.” I am glad that we now have tee shirts and bumper stickers that say “I remember when racing was dangerous and sex was safe.” Attitudes about what are acceptable dangers change, all of these race car drivers understood the risk, and made a choice. I feel a loss whenever someone I admire like a racing driver is killed. I especially feel pain for their family, but they accepted the risk and understood the consequences. For them the risk was worth the reward.