Extremely hot take incoming.
The Halo is majorly over-rated, and the overwhelming majority of instances where it has been praised is because we simply don't know what would have happened without it. Were the track marshals at Bahrain even more incompetent than they were during the 2020 finale, Grosjean probably would have burned to death regardless. I can also recall an early incident where Raikkonen was trapped in his car because of a malfunction.
Who, in all honesty, died in open wheel racing throughout recent history (i.e. 1980s onwards) as the result of a head injury? I can think of two; Henry Surtees in 2009, and Justin Wilson in 2015, both of them freak occurrences. This is motor racing; accidents like that are going to occur. It's not a case of who will be the last person to die, period, in a particular discipline such as F1 or GT cars, but who will be the last person to die
in a while. Allan Simonsen, driving a modern-specification GTE car, still died at Le Mans in 2013. All the safety measures and precautions in the world cannot change the fact you are driving a 1-ton hunk of metal at speeds of over 200 MPH along with many other people doing the same, and accidents WILL happen. The human body was never designed to go anywhere near these speeds, and will not develop any evolutionary traits to accomodate for this for a good few centuries.
A Massa-type event can still happen were the part positioned at just the right angle and aimed at just the right trajectory, through one of the two gaps in the Halo. It is a compromise, otherwise open-wheeled racing would cease to exist, and there were other solutions, like Red Bull's aeroscreen for instance, which is much more fitting for a sport like F1 as many cars in the '60s and '70s did have a similar windshield in the days before full-face helmets.
Jules Bianchi died as a result of
failing to follow correct racing procedure and would have died even with a closed cockpit, contrary to the many revisionist redditors out there with comparatively minimal wheel knowledge. Now because of him, every race that has >5mm of rain will be red-flagged, like we saw in Monaco.
I am sick to the fucking gills over early 20s-redditors who read a book or two on F1 after following DTS and suddenly think they're an expert on the sport. I've been watching since 1998, through thousands of practice, qualifying and race sessions. In that time, I've seen many rollovers, shunts, and close calls. Not once have I seen a driver die due to a head injury. Other than Massa (and Sutil fucking up Schumi's neck), I have never seen an injury in F1 that directly affected the driver's head/neck, as that's what HANS was designed for.
Of every 10 incidents they blindly praise the Halo (PBUH), probably 8 or 9 of those the driver would have walked from. That old jew Nissany for instance had more or less the same accident as what happened at the start of Belgium twice in the last decade. No-one died during either of those crashes. I am fed up of people in general thinking every minor shunt in F1 can be directly attributed to the Halo, when this simply isn't the case. If Webber's flip at Valencia 2010 is anything to go by, Zhou probably would have survived unscathed.
What was
far more concerning about that accident is the fact the catchfence barely caught Zhou's car, and we could have easily seen a repeat of Le Man 1955 had the rear tyre not dug in and absorbed a lot of the inertia.