Guys,
Here's another comment I want to preserve for posterity, so I'm copying it and pasting it here. It's about how the attitude towards death and racing have changed over the years. This comment was originally left in response to a video about F1 great Jackie Stewart's push for safety.
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Prior to Jackie Stewart's push for safety, there was a very blase attitude towards safety. The attitude towards the drivers, was: hey, if you don't like it, there are 100 guys waiting to take your seat; there's the door. I think that the classic movie, "Grand Prix", captured this attitude very well.
Secondly, when Indy Car and F1 resumed after WWII, death had been a commonplace occurrence; after all, tens of thousands had died during the war. This attitude was captured in the 1955 Indy 500. There was a fatal and fiery crash during the race. The race was stopped, cleaned up, and then continued. That would be UNTHINKABLE today! However, the 1955 Indy 500 was just 10 years after WWII, and everyone had either lost someone close to them during the war, or they knew someone who'd been killed. Death had been a common occurrence in the recent past.
Along with that, everyone knew that auto racing was dangerous, and that death came with the territory, as they say. The attitude was, if you climb into a car or onto a motorcycle to race, you know that death is a possibility. It wasn't that people wanted drivers to die; it's that the prevailing attitude was that they knew what they were getting into, and if they die, they die. They knew the risk, and they accepted it. Attitudes were very different post WWII.
