If today’s Formula 1 has become the marriage of entertainment and safety, it is mainly due to FIA, which after the deaths of Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger imposed ever higher standards on teams and circuits to protect the safety of the drivers. Despite being aware that motorsport was a dangerous sport and that the risk of a tragedy could not be eliminated, the Federation has made enormous strides on the safety side. Among these, theHalowhich former president Jean Todt has been thinking about since 2009, precisely from the accident that occurred to Felipe Massa in qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix.
From the spring that hit the Brazilian to the actual introduction of the Halo, however, a good nine years have passed. And only in the last five years we have had various examples of the importance of this element: the departure of Spa in 2018, or the Charles Leclerc mirror flown in the Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton at Suzuka 2019, not to mention the terrible accident of Romain Grosjean at Sakhir in 2020 and that of Guanyu Zhou in the last race at Silverstone. Why was so much time wasted? Todt tried to explain it.
“When I was elected president of the FIA, I immediately put safety as the first point. It is not always easy, because people are reluctant to change. The episodes that made me think of the Halo were the one that involved Massa in Budapest and the one in which John Surtees’ son lost his life. People didn’t want the halo. I asked the engineers if this introduction could save the pilots’ lives. They told me yes, and so I imposed it. The only thing we can say is that we’ve wasted some time on it”, The Frenchman told al Sports Festival. “Once upon a time people went to races like they went to bullfights: he wanted to see a pilot, a man, wounded. The riders had helmets that not even a cyclist would wear today. Jackie Stewart and Niki Lauda fought for safety“.
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