Making the Case for Safety.

Warning: this post is a little harrowing.

I watched a documentary on the TV last night, about the dangers of F1 motor racing during the sixties and early seventies, and the efforts of people like Jackie Stewart to make the sport safer for both drivers and spectators. It contained much that was astonishing seen in retrospect, but one image stood out. It was poignant and, to a sensitive spirit, utterly depressing.

It appears that the dangers to drivers were many, but the most prolific of them was fire. Most cars that crashed burst into flames, and the chances of escaping the inferno were slim. Several times the programme showed footage of a driver’s body being lifted out of the wrecked car after the fire had been extinguished. It was little more than a pastiche of the man that had once been vibrant with life and courage. Two marshals, if such they were called then, put one hand under each armpit and lifted it quite easily. What got through my own emotional guard most, for some unknown reason, was that the arms still had hands attached to them, and they swung poignantly and without purpose.  

I wondered how the man’s wife would have felt if she’d seen that footage. Here was a man she had known intimately; a man she had lived with, laughed with, argued with, cried with and made love to, now reduced to some lifeless lump resembling a scarecrow. Children might have sat around it in the run up to Bonfire Night, asking for ‘a penny for the Guy.’

And then I wondered what had gone through the man’s mind as the flames engulfed him. Was it intense fear at the prospect of the most unimaginable pain? Was it consumed with the knowledge that his life was about to end? Did he think about his wife and family? Did he hope against hope for rescue? Was he mercifully unconscious, or does the mind have a mechanism for blanking everything in that situation even if it’s still functioning on some level?

And throughout it all the race carried on. Was that because there was scant regard for life, or because ‘the show must go on,’ or because commercial exigency required it as the commentary suggested? Or were the race organisers paying service to the sensibilities of the spectators, hoping perhaps that the sound of high powered engines would drown the screams of a man being burned alive?

Whatever the reason, it depressed the hell out of me right up until bed time.