timbo wrote:the cars of that era were death traps. they lost 3 or 4 drivers world wide that year. that was just before carbon fiber monocoques were introduced on a wide scale. it took another 10 years to develop acceptable fuel tanks and front impact safety. look at the driver position.
Well, I agree, although 1982 was the year Villeneuve died and to me 1994 Williams FW15 was a death trap too. I was mostly comparing looks of the car of F1 and Indy of that era and of say 90's - in early 80's IndyCars to me looked as advanced as F1 (compare this car's sidepods to the next year Brabham), while later they started to look obsolete.
My impression was that F1 cars of that era were equally unsafe as the IndyCar variety. Considering the much bigger desaster potential of the ovals I'm amazed that the public shrugged off the fatal accidents so easily.
The similarity to F1 is striking. Vielleneuve's and Smiley's cars both desintegrated around them and left their broken bodies unprotected to the forces of inertia. Video and testimony of their first aid doctors is quite somber.
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While rushing to the car, I noticed small splotches of a peculiar gray substance marking a trail on the asphalt leading up to the driver. When I reached the car, I was shocked to see that Smiley's helmet was gone, along with the top of his skull. He had essentially been scalped by the debris fence. The material on the race track was most of his brain. His helmet, due to massive centrifugal force, was literally pulled from his head on impact...I rode to the care center with the body. On the way in I performed a cursory examination and realized that nearly every bone in his body was shattered. He had a gaping wound in his side that looked as if he had been attacked by a large shark. I had never seen such trauma."
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It was a take-off of extraordinary proportions. When a car spins and then hits a solid object; no loss of speed, no deceleration before impact. The Ferrari was airborne for over 100 yards before it slammed down nose-first onto the track with terrific force, buckling the front of the car into the cockpit. But the energy was scarcely dissipated and the accident went on and on. The car catapulted high into the air again and began a series of horrific cartwheels, at one point touching down on an earth bank some distance behind the guardrails on the right side of the entry to Terlamenbocht. On its return to the cirit the uncontrolled projectile very nearly landed on the slow-moving March of Jochen Mass that had triggered the accident. Mass was just able to swerve onto the grass to avoid being crushed.
The aluminium honeycomb chassis began to disintegrate; pieces flew in all directions. The seatbelts pulled out of their mountings. The driver, the seat and the steering wheel became detached and were hurled nearly 150 feet before ploughing through two layers of catch fencing on the left side of Terlamenbocht. Villeneuve's helmet flew off and rolled some distance from his body. Villeneuve was thrown from the car with his seat and seatbelt restraints still attached to him - all having been wrenched form the car - so high was the energy. Whether his neck fracture occurred when he left the car or landed near the catch fencing will never be known. A Belgian surgeon was on the scene in 35 seconds and began to try to revive Villeneuve's inert form with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He banged his chest and gave him heart massage.
At 1.52pm, alerted by the red flag, professor Sid Watkins, the FIA doctor, roared round in his Mercedes estate driven by Belgian Roland Bruynseraede who had to thread his way through the wreckage. Watkins could see it was bad. The scene of utter devastation bore awful testimony to the enormity of the crash. Bits and pieces of wreckage were strewn along the circuit for over 500 feet. There, in the middle of the track, was the totally destroyed chassis, shorn of all bodywork, with only the right rear wheel remaining and the entire front section ripped off at the point where the driver once sat.
Beyond the remains of the car, amid the tangled wire of the catch fencing on the outside of the corner, distraught track marshals stood around the medical personnel, wringing their hands in anguish. The Belgian surgeon bent over Villeneuve waved over to Watkins to help. He lay in catch fencing.
It had taken Watkins two minutes to get to the scene from the pits and Villeneuve had stopped breathing. He was intubated and the medics started ventilating him with an Ambu bag and oxygen. Watkins remembers: "He was quite flaccid and his pupils were dilated. Generally he looked otherwise uninjured, so we concluded he probably had a cervical spine fracture with high spinal cord injury. The strange feature was that his shoes and socks were off; and his feet quite bare. I looked up and found Pironi had stopped and was behind me, but after a few seconds he turned and left. Other help arrived and we set up intravenous drips. Gilles's pulse had been present throughout and had been quite strong, but the situation looked pretty bad."
Anybody who examines the grisley testimony will easily conclude that safety wasn't an issue at that time. With hindsight we can see how those events influenced some perceptive minds and how it got better over the years.
I believe we should never forget what our fathers learned and keep those lessons in mind. For me race car esthetics are always connected to the victories and the victims they produced.
John Barnard will remain the greatest race car designer for ever in my view for his life saving invention. Jackie Stewart for his pioneer stance on safety, Prof. Sid Watkins for his role as the greatest medical mind in F1, Max Mosley for pushing it through, Dr. Robert Hubbert for HANS and Michael Schumacher for reviving GPDA after Imola 1994 all made great contributions towards life saving in racing. I wish that F1 will continue in that spirit for a long time.
I have had that bookmark for ages, my boss is one of the biggest Gurney fans I've ever met. Heck we have a wall in the store lined with various pictures of Eagles and other cars Dan drove.