Formula 1 Discussion - And favourite driver?

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Weeb Slinger said:
Contemporary F1 reminds me of a trope in The A-Team where a vehicle (usually an army jeep) will launch itself skyward and corkscrew several times before coming to a rest upside-down. Then the driver and the passenger will immediately climb out and dust themselves off, as if the accident was a minor inconvenience.

The FIA should know by now, that if there is an area of a circuit where a crash seems unlikely, Grosjean will manage to put his car there. It's an anti-talent. They should really keep him on as a driver to sound out any weak links in their safety provision.
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Just give him a Merc painted in hazard stripes.
 
That was by far the worst crash I've seen live (I only started watching this season, but I don't remember anything this bad in the past few years). Checo's engine cutting out right near the end was really heartbreaking, too. Really bad day overall, those shitty guardrails better be replaced for next weekend.

I personally thought it was really low-brow for the network to constantly show Grosjean's crash during the red flag. It's understandable that people might have tuned in late and wanted to know what happened, but it was replayed a lot more than it should have.

https://twitter.com/F1/status/1333141226946768898

2020-11-29 15_30_14-Formula 1 on Twitter_ _The best video we've seen today_ THIS 🙂 👊 #BahrainG...png


He's smiling though. Today could have been a lot worse, so I'm really thankful for that.
 
Steiner saying like it is:
Van der Merwe charged in there and helped Grosjean as quickly as he could. Fortunately, Grosjean could free himself from his cockpit (which alone is a massive feat in and of itself),
Also a look at the barrier after the race:

I think the Halo not just protected Grosjean's head from impacting the barrier, it also made the remains of the cockpit flip in a way to point towards the track and away from the worst of the fire...
Man, when you really think about it, if the crash had knocked out Grosjean, if part of the railing had come loose and impaled him, if the cockpit had been stuck in a way to block the opening at the top...
there are so many ways how this could have killed him and seemingly only one way how it could have gone with him surviving - thank god that's what we got. Next race, they need to install better barriers, otherwise racing there is simply a bad idea.

Also: Ross Brawn on the topic of F1 safety and the Halo in this crash.

That was by far the worst crash I've seen live (I only started watching this season, but I don't remember anything this bad in the past few years).
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I've been watching F1 for the better part of the past 30 years and I think it's the worst crash for a very long time. Unsurprisingly, Bianchi's ultimately fatal crash comes to mind, but there was also Kubicas crash in 2007 where he, like Grosjean today, escaped barely hurt (strangely enough, I watched that just yesterday and marveled at how safe the cars in 2007 were in comparison to 1994).
There are a couple of instances where drivers got in bad crashes, but these three are about the worst of the past 2 decades. The only worse crash that would come to mind that happened somewhat recently would be Anthoine Hubert's fatal crash, that also severely injured Correa. Here's an x-ray-image of Correa's legs after the crash, just to underline how terrible that crash was:
nvk9hy087yq51.jpg
 
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Not to be that guy but why the fuck is that barrier so close to the track at a 44 degree angle. Those metal barriers are best to put parallel to a straight and bounce a car along the wall , not to stop it like a tyre barrier. Of course hindsight is 20/20 but that has to have been considered hazardous beforehand
 
Full Race Replay said:
Not to be that guy but why the fuck is that barrier so close to the track at a 44 degree angle. Those metal barriers are best to put parallel to a straight and bounce a car along the wall , not to stop it like a tyre barrier. Of course hindsight is 20/20 but that has to have been considered hazardous beforehand
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The angle is due to the barrier slimming down after the corners in that part of the track with an entry passage for cars just about at the area where Grosjean struck. Those openings usually allow, for instance, tow trucks, firefighters or medical crews to drive on (or off) the track, so they are very necessary, and to avoid some car slamming through the opening, they are set up at that angle. Someone on Youtube called it a freak accident and I think he's correct, since Grosjean struck the barrier at such an odd angle at such an odd place with such high speed and nose first (which increases the strain on the barrier)...
That being said, only having a steel rail barrier without something to cushion the impact is a terrible idea, especially since it was too weak to withstand the impact and the car broke through partially.

Something that has kind of fallen by the wayside in all of this:
Holy fucking shit. Thankfully, no track marshalls were hurt in this crash, either. We've seen marshalls getting killed by debris in the past, what a lucky turn of events this entire thing ended up as, with no one being significantly hurt. I'm still gobsmacked by that...
 
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RomanesEuntDomus said:
The angle is due to the barrier slimming down after the corners in that part of the track with an entry passage for cars just about at the area where Grosjean struck. Those openings usually allow, for instance, tow trucks, firefighters or medical crews to drive on (or off) the track, so they are very necessary, and to avoid some car slamming through the opening, they are set up at that angle. Someone on Youtube called it a freak accident and I think he's correct, since Grosjean struck the barrier at such an odd angle at such an o
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I know it’s for a service road but I’m worried that it’s so close to perpendicular with the racing line and not a tyre barrier or something else to absorb the impact more.
 
On topic of crashes, I remember Spa in 98 (Villenueve) and 99 (Vil and Zonta) had pretty big wrecks. Nowhere near as serious as today, but at time they were quite heavy shunts as they say:
Alonso Aus 2016 was fairly serious, Spectacular in slo-mo.

But fireballs and guard rails/fencing are the ones that killed a lot of drivers. Cevert at Watkins Glen was similar to Grosjean's and he was either decapitated or sliced in half.

The worst one I saw live was Greg Moore in last race of '99 in CART. That was brutal. Thank god days of high-def TV weren't around. Also Wickens at Pocono was bad, Dan Wheldon, Brack at Texas, Bourdais at Indy. But those are all Indy.
 
Idk, but either I'm underestimating danger or overestimating safety here. When Grosjean went into the barrier I didn't even think that he will die. Like at the moment I remembered the stuff that makes sure he won't die in this day and age, like halo, all of the fire-resistant layers, that marshalls these days are actually equipped to fight fires, the medical car behind the pack, ability to airlift drivers to the hospital and the carbon chassis that is built to take impacts (If Kubica didn't die in Canada 2007, Grosjean doesn't die here).

I have probably seen videos of most of the fatal main series racing crashes since 1980. I have seen Smiley, Bianchi, Hubert, Ratzenberger, Senna, Villeneuve, Paletti, and many others lose their lives while racing, and not for a second I thought that Grosjean will die.

On a side note, I like using the crash photos database that is run by the fastlane. Lots of motorsports crashes since the late 19th century including all of the gory bits.
http://the-fastlane.co.uk/cpdb/crashphotos_list.php
 
When I saw the car in two pieces I did have some thoughts of the Hubert crash to be honest luckily it split in a different place.

Even with all those safety features had that car been at a slightly different angle he wasn't getting out past the barrier or if he was knocked unconscious and wasn't able to get out himself it would have been a lot worse as they would not have been able to do that until that fire was out.
 
I think one of you also said that if Grosjean were more unlucky one of the thick metal bars from the guardrail could have impaled him...yuck

Good news, Grosjean will be released from the hospital on tuesday, but Pietro Fittipaldi will drive in his place for Sakhir. (Not Emmerson, excuse me)
 
The quiet boi said:
Idk, but either I'm underestimating danger or overestimating safety here. When Grosjean went into the barrier I didn't even think that he will die. Like at the moment I remembered the stuff that makes sure he won't die in this day and age, like halo, all of the fire-resistant layers, that marshalls these days are actually equipped to fight fires, the medical car behind the pack, ability to airlift drivers to the hospital and the carbon chassis that is built to take impacts (If Kubica didn't die in Canada 2007, Grosjean doesn't die here).
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I guess it depends a little on how much racing stuff you have watched in the past. You watched the fatal crashes of many drivers, but was that only videos of those crashes on youtube or the live coverage, cause that might explain some of the difference (and also, you have more trust in F1 engineering and possibly a more optimistic take).
For me, I immediately thought that this was a really bad crash, that was very likely to be fatal for the driver. As you said, there are a lot of systems that give drivers a very good chance to survive and this crash would have been simply unsurvivable without Halo, Hans, the padding around the outside edge of the cockpit and so on.
However, the way how this panned out, especially on live coverage, had a lot of really bad signs:
  • The car went straight off the track without losing any speed whatsoever and crashed directly into a naked steel barrier.
  • It exploded into a huge ball of fire, something that I can't even remember ever seeing happen in a crash (the last time a car went up in flames that I can remember was Verstappen 1994's refueling incident). This explosion implied that the damage sustained by the car was way more severe than even the crash that took Hubert's life and that the car has broken in a way that has never been seen before with this kind of car and this set of safety features.
  • The live coverage did not show the aftermath of the crash or a replay. That usually happens when something really bad happened, the driver is still not salvaged... and with the tank ripping open and spilling almost 200 litres of racing fuel all over the wreck... well. Doesn't take much imagination to figure out what that might spell out. When they did cut back to the scene of the accident, for a short moment, they showed an angle where you could see that the car was torn in half and the cockpit was just completely gone, thankfully, they immediately went back to show Grosjean in the medical car, so we knew he was alright.
There is also one thing regarding the Halo: It did save Grosjeans life, no doubt about that, but up to this crash, we didn't know the Halo was capable of even withstanding such a blow. It's meant to deflect wheel assemblies striking the car, the loads of having a 1 ton vehicle crash into a rigid steel barrier at speeds in excess of 150kph are an entirely different beast.
Kinda like back when they introduced the monocoque, no one knew how much it would actually withstand. I once saw a documentation, where an engineer of that era said that they weren't entirely sure how exactly it would crumble in case of an actual accident (not just a simulated crash test). Some engineers feared it might just crack open like an egg, but it turned out that it crumbles from the point of impact onwards, meaning that for every inch of monocoque that gets smashed into powder, the car loses absurd amounts of kinetic energy and that it is the most perfect system to ensure a driver's safety.
In this case, the Halo had to deal with an impact it was simply not designed to take and it somehow held together. I would not count on it working a second time in a similar situation.

Looking at the aftermath of the crash still gives me the chills. The torn off cockpit stuck in that fencing alone is nightmare fuel - even after the fire was extinguished.
How insanely lucky that the cockpit was torn off in one piece, there have been crashes in open-wheel racing where the cockpit broke open right along the edges of the back rest.
Something to keep in mind as well: Grosjean had the wherewithall to unbuckle and get out of there asap. He didn't lose his head or panic, that is pretty admirable.

Coccxys said:
When I saw the car in two pieces I did have some thoughts of the Hubert crash to be honest luckily it split in a different place.

Even with all those safety features had that car been at a slightly different angle he wasn't getting out past the barrier or if he was knocked unconscious and wasn't able to get out himself it would have been a lot worse as they would not have been able to do that until that fire was out.
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A lot of the times, it's not even the burns that kill the drivers, it's the fumes that they breathe in and the lung damage that this causes. Not only are the fumes highly toxic, but they also boil your lungs from the inside. Lauda sustained severe burns on several parts of his body, but what almost killed him was the toxic shock and the lung-damage. Even if they had managed to douse an unconcious Gorsjean with extinguisher fluid, chances still are high that he'd breathe in enough toxic stuff to suffere severely.

Edit:
Compilation of all driver's reactions to Grosjeans crash.
 
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Still feel really bad for Kvyat. Not only was the radio message extremely heartbreaking (imagine driving away and seeing something like that on your mirrors), but tons of retarded keyboard warriors are now spamming his social media as if the crash was his fault. Dude's had the shittiest luck on the grid alongside Ocon this year IMO.
 
Hard agree. I strongly believe that the FIA gave Kvyat a 10 second penalty just because they wanted blood, and he was in the wrong place at the wrong time twice. I really hope he makes the most of the last two races but I feel like he's getting the boot regardless.
 
Endu said:
Hard agree. I strongly believe that the FIA gave Kvyat a 10 second penalty just because they wanted blood, and he was in the wrong place at the wrong time twice. I really hope he makes the most of the last two races but I feel like he's getting the boot regardless.
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Eh, the divebomb he did on Stroll was quite dumb. He's lucky that his car didn't suffer more damage in it.
 
It was quite odd it was a 10 second penalty rather than a 5 second penalty. It was a dumb move but no more dumb than we've seen either totally let off or just given 5 seconds. It sucks retards are after him now, just wrong place at the wrong time. I doubt he's getting renewed anyway, they already tried to can him once but had no one worth putting in the car instead.

I hope Grosjean is fit for the last GP, would really suck for that to be the last action of his career. Not that he's going to be having a glorious end in that dog of a car.
 
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