During Formula 2’s Sunday-morning sprint race at Sochi, we had the worst-case scenario for a racing driver for Luca Ghiotto.
Going underneath the safety barriers is bad enough, but the car then catching fire is a bad situation but fortunately luck was on the side of the drivers with both Ghiotto and Jack Aitken getting out of their crashed cars injury free.
The crash happened as they battled side by side through the long, fast Turn 3 left-hander. They made wheel-to-wheel contact and both speared off into the barriers. Aitken explained afterwards he thinks he suffered a puncture or suspension failure.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CFooWw0nIfj/?igshid=lxmbd8f3jzj8
The lucky part was that the Tecpro barriers didn’t stay on top of the cars because, in that situation and with the halo, you can then be left without a fire exit.
To add to this potential problem, I have to say that the reactions of the marshals to the fire were too slow as basically they let the car burn itself to a cinder before getting involved. Perhaps this was down to there being fewer marshals at races thanks to the COVID situation, but here’s what FIA race director Michael Masi had to say about it:
“They got there actually relatively quickly,” said Masi. “The challenge was that it was quite a distance between two marshals’ posts where the incident occurred so the fireman was obviously from the marshals’ posts that were both on the side of the incident.
“I wouldn’t want to be running with a fire extinguisher for the best part of 150 metres or whatever.
This crash ended the Sprint Race prematurely 🚩
Thankfully both Jack Aitken and Luca Ghiotto walked away from the incident#RussianGP 🇷🇺 #F2 pic.twitter.com/qPexWLQjaf
— Formula 2 (@FIA_F2) September 27, 2020
“Then as soon as the race was suspended and all of the competition cars had gone past we also saw marshals from the opposite side of the track cross.
“Yes, seeing a fire is never good. The positive side was both drivers got out unscathed, which is the most important element of all.”
He’s right that it was good to see both drivers escape but the big concern is why the cars went under the Tecpro barriers.
I don’t want to keep harping on about this low-nose situation but this is just an example of the type of accident that can happen when a car goes underneath the protection system. It could just as easily, and with worse consequences, be that one car goes underneath another and that style of accident combined with fire is the worst possible situation.
Masi didn’t offer any initial conclusions over the circumstances of the accident but did say the FIA would, as always, look into it.
Accidents will always happen and during any accident tyres will get punctured or wheels broken. But it’s the next step that needs to addressed – how and what the car hits is critical. The Tecpro barrier is a safe cushion to hit but only if you don’t go underneath it.
Comparing this accident to Lance Stroll’s accident at Mugello when he picked up a puncture shows that, while on both occasions the cars were destroyed, the actual outcome can be very different depending on the kind of barrier and how the car hits it.
I was at Zandvoort in 1973 for the Dutch Grand Prix when Roger Williamson lost his life to a fire because he was trapped underneath his overturned car. Yes, it was a completely different type of accident to what we saw to Sochi. But motorsport is only ‘luck’ and big advancements in safety technology away from a similar end result. Fires and trapped drivers are still possible in 2020.
And we know that no matter how much the safety equipment and standards improve, we can’t ever take for granted that drivers will always walk away from every accident.
