Romain Grosjean walked away from F1’s scariest crash in decades
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Seeing the replays afterwards, it reminded me of the footage of Niki Lauda's crash at the 1976 German Grand Prix. He was caught in a fiery inferno for something like 40-50 seconds, which severely damaged his lungs and face and disfigured him for life. Six weeks later, with bandages still covering his head, he was back on track, racing again. He would go on to win several championships. Luckily, it seems like Romain got away with much lighter wounds.
I was thinking to myself during the race about the 19 other drives, thinking "how do you go sit in a car and race for 90 minutes after seeing that happen?", but these guys are made of sterner stuff than me.
Thank god for the halo, and the hardened monocoque (which basically stayed intact after a 200 kph crash!), and the improved firesuits, and the medical car following at the start, and the marshals at the side of the track with fire extinguishers, and a thousand other small safety measures. Romain Grosjean is alive today because of decades of tireless work making the sport safer. Thank god for Jackie Stewart, Niki Lauda, Sid Watkins, Charlie Whiting and everyone else who has worked tirelessly to this end.
I never realized that there is a medical car trailing the field on the first lap of every race. Just moments after the crash the med car driver and doctor hopped out and began extinguishing the flames and were able to help Grosjean get over the rail that he had split open.
I’m amazed that he was able to get out and walk away from that. When you watch the footage it seems like he is in the flaming inferno forever!
There are couple of criticisms that has been floating around that I don’t entirely disagree with: If the guard rail hadn’t failed the car probably wouldn’t have split in half and caught fire like that. Though to be fair, who’s to say what could have happened with an almost frontal impact at that speed, regardless of what he had crashed into.
The other one is more of an observation than an actual criticism: If he had been knocked unconscious he wouldn’t have had a chance. Though there were multiple people with fire extinguishers there’s no way they could have put the fire out fast enough to drag him out of the car. Which again feeds into the whole ‘the guard rail shouldn’t have failed, and if it hadn’t the car wouldn’t have caught fire’ deal.
All that said though, the level of safety built into these cars is absolutely amazing: The halo, the survival cell and things like that were put to the ultimate test and really saved the day alongside the brave first responders.
Clearly, this crash needs to be studied to see if any new safety regulations are needed for those kinds of service roads that jut out next to high speed straights. I have every confidence in the FIA to do that (both the halo and the VSC resulted from studying Jules Bianchi’s fatal crash). As far as safety goes, the FIA is (IMHO) one of the most responsible and trustworthy sporting organizations in the world.
He was out of the car within 18seconds.
I highly doubt if he had been stuck in or knocked out they would have been put the fire out in less than a few seconds more. They only had one person with the right fire extinguishers there at the time. The rest all add ones for smaller fires.
I don't know how long it took them to put it out, but all the drivers could still see the fire driving back to the pits so probably a minute or so.
In short of the many things that save Romain sunday, being able to get himself out was probably the key one.
Watching this live I couldn't believe it, I audibly gasped when I saw a fireball in F1 in 2020.
More impressive is how the thorough enactment of safety rules really played all out in Romain's accident like you mentioned. It's easy to get complacent after a while without major accidents, in most industries, it was really heartwarming seeing how the preparation of years paid off to save a life.
Also: on the first lap of the restart, another driver (Lance Stroll for Racing Point) flipped his car after a collision. He was fine (F1 cars are designed to be able to handle being flipped upside down), but man, this race seriously frayed your nerves.
[0] - https://youtu.be/3-3gIAkYEX8 [1] - https://youtu.be/zM-ixqBQNcQ
This.....just sounds so horrific and a nightmare scenario for the driver. At that speed I wonder how much of a sense a driver has of going through this experience vs it's over in an instant. Overall, it's a testament to engineering, that a person can walk away alive from a crash like this.
Not just to engineering, but also the training and performance of all the track stewards - first person to put a fire extinguisher on the wreck was 7 (!) seconds after the crash. That's unbelievably fast.
Grosjean survived due to every person and every piece of technology working exactly as they should.
I think this misses a couple of key points. The only reason his car tore in half and caught fire was because the barrier failed spectacularly. It’s absolutely not supposed to do that. LeClerc had a bigger crash in Monza this year, and it wasn’t nearly as dramatic. So this incident was caused by a piece of safety technology failing catastrophically, with a whole bunch of other safety tech working as intended to save his life.
Also it’s good the marshals and medical crew were there so quickly (as the medical car follows the pack on the first lap). But they basically contributed nothing to Grosjean’s survival. He was completely engulfed in flames for 18 seconds. He survived because his flame protection worked (he got his burns from using his hands to climb over the hot barrier, not from exposure to flames), and because he wasn’t incapacitated by the crash. If he had been knocked unconscious or injured too badly to move, he would have burnt to death in there. The couple of fire extinguishers they had on the car weren’t doing anything to a fire of that size.
Also there is a theory that the pole holding up the rails didnt shear off at all and thats why the car got snapped in half.
I don’t know if this Armco wasn’t up to spec, but the way this barrier performed, it made the crash as bad is it could possibly have been. Compare this crash to LeClerc binning it at a similar speed/angle into the tire barrier at Monza.
It seems that literally any other sort of barrier would have performed better here, and since this is a fast part of the track, you’d typically expect this to be something that had already been considered.
It seems to me that the concrete barrier they erected after cutting out the broken section wouldn’t be a great thing to drive into at 140mph, either. I’m curious to see if they have tires in place there next weekend.
Incidentally, I’m pretty sure areas where the Armco rail can’t be replaced with something safer and more modern due to space constraints are the reason some classic tracks are not rated by the FIA as safe for F1. I think that’s part of the problem with Watkins Glen.
> Incidentally, I’m pretty sure areas where the Armco rail can’t be replaced with something safer and more modern due to space constraints are the reason some classic tracks are not rated by the FIA as safe for F1.
A lot of classic tracks wouldn’t get grade 1 status if they were built today, some of them are just kept on the calendar because they’re too classic to remove. Monaco and Spa are two examples. I don’t think they’d drop Spa, and they’re certainly not going to drop Monaco, but those circuits are not up to modern safety standards.
Some of the classic American tracks would bring unique challenges to F1, and that would be interesting to see. I have to admit that some of my thinking in this area is a little sadistic... it would be entertaining to see F1 teams try to survive driving at Sebring. The Indycar teams practice there, and their cars can barely do it.
In any case, another race in NA on the first half of the calendar, around the time of Montreal, would make a lot of sense. Last year the teams literally shipped everything from France to Quebec and, immediately after the race, shipped everything back from Quebec to France. Driving south a few hours to race in New York would make sense.
I'm against the idea because there are so many good tracks to host races at, and I don't trust them to build new ones that are any good. They've proven that they're more than happy to put on boring races for anybody who has enough money. The fact that Abu Dhabi is the last race on the calendar, and that they're planning to put Saudi Arabia right behind it guarantees that having an exciting title-deciding season end is just logistically impossible now. I mean, is there a single person in the world who thinks that KSA is going to have a decent circuit?
Why?
I really like baku because of the straights and especially the fact of the narrowness of the track. But I believe with those very long chassis, it's quite hard to see wheel to wheel overtakes overthere.
It's apparently a good track for teammate battles, with closely matched drivers in evenly matched cars. The Mercedes guys pushing one another in 2019, or the Red Bull guys crashing into each other in 2018, were both pretty memorable. Lots of low-speed tangles there in general, and it's also a pretty challenging track for drivers trying to get their fastest lap in practice or qualifying. (there's always more time to be had, but there are also a number of walls arguing against pushing too hard)
It's probably rare for a street course to offer so many options for how to set the car up, too, thanks to the long straight. There's a lot to be said for a slower, high downforce setup with all those right angle turns, but on the straight, Bottas went 235MPH there (!!!) in a practice when he driving for Williams.
They supposed to slow down (gracefully, not 50G we saw) and contain the car. Different corners (slow/fast) use different designs. Barrier technically failed at both tasks. You can argue that ripping the car in half was containing, but that wasn't supposed to happen.
The crash was at an access road for one, but the bigger part of being there so fast is thanks in part to the medical car that stages on the track and starts with the cars, but behind the field. They follow the racers around for the first lap so that they’re almost immediately at the scene of any crash.
You instinctively take your hands off the wheel if you have raced karts enough to get into a crash where you hurt your thumbs, that or you've trained to do it.
I even do it on racing sims some times, completely out of instinct.
To be able to hit guardrail at 220km/h which dissipated the energy without killing the driver of deceleration, have the car ripped apart on purpose, have the flimsy compartment keep its integrity without anything penetrating the driver, have fuel contained and only a little bit of it spill, have the suit save him from almost all of burns.
https://www.espn.com/f1/story/_/id/30416593/romain-grosjean-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/k3sflu/i_did_a_re...
less than 30 seconds after a 130mph/55G crash through a metal barrier and sitting inside a fireball
It almost feels like a video game.
As a rookie he was widely faulted for being faulty judgment, causing frequent crashes with other drivers when a more experienced driver wouldn't have stuck their nose in. It was clear how hard he was trying to do the right thing, yet the harder he tried, the worse the problem seemed to get, and there was talk about dropping him from the team.
Much to his credit, he recognized that he was unable to solve the problem on his own. Drivers tend to have big egos, beating their chests and blaming other people and their equipment. But Grosjean took responsibility, and in interviews you could see how it was breaking his heart to realize how this problem was likely to cost him his career. So he swallowed his pride and started to work with a sports psychologist, who helped him gain better control of his actions. The turn-around in his on-track behavior was quickly evident, and his willingness to take responsibility and look outside for help made him a much better driver.