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.
2 comments:
The change in attitudes towards death and injury came via auto racing being televised starting in the 1960s, but especially in the 1970s. It was one thing to see a picture of a destroyed racing car in the newspaper the next day, quite another to see a car slam into a crash wall (or another car) and burst into flames or disintegrate spewing wreckage and the poor unfortunate driver on live television (or tape delayed). I think of the 1973 Indianapolis 500 where fans could see Salt Walther's car crash into the crash fence on the main straightaway, spewing fuel into the crowd on ABC's Wide World of Sports, or later seeing in the same telecast Swede Savage's absolutely horrifying crash coming out of turn four that absolutely obliterated the car and sent what was left of the car spinning back out onto the race track with poor Swede strapped in the flaming wreckage, and then seeing a mechanic killed when he was hit by a fire safety vehicle racing to the scene of the accident.
The public was sickened and outraged and the pressure was on to make cars, and racing safer (it can't be 100% safe) and cavalier attitudes towards death began to disappear.
I'm old enough to REMEMBER Swede Savage's crash! With TV covering the sport more, that brought the sponsorships and corporate money into the sport as well. A large part of sponsorship involves the brand being associated with a driver, so as to build an association and brand equity. It's hard to do that when drivers are dying all the time, like they did in during the 1950s and 1960s. Back in those days, it was nothing for F1 to lose a few drivers a season. Now, because the sport has been made safer, losing a driver is newsworthy event.
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