Maria de Villotta injured in testing

[Raptor22]

freak accidents raise insurance costs. simple and plain fact. No emotion, no nostalgia, just fact. Insurer's will now look at De Vitolla's accident and access what changes need to be brough in line to keep risk down.
If they look at head injuries over the past 4 years, then F1 is in trouble anyway.

Massa getting hit on the head by a errant spring from a Brawn. Freak accident but insurance risk is measured in freak. History shows that once a frak accident happens its no longer a freak accident and therefore it will happen again and does.

As I mentioned in a previous post Massa got lucky, Schumacher got lucky. We see F1 cars getting lifted into the air accident all the time, Webber, Monaco last year, and there are many more. At what point do fans see that that the freak event is actually not as freak but rather a similar event repeated many times in different locations and with different people and that at some point, all the ingedrients for a truelly horrific accident will come together to provide it. The only antidote is progress and asking what if.
This question was asked many times during the Senna/Prost/Berger era and the unthinkable happened. ANd then fans called it a freak event and still wanted their gladiators to be exposed to danger.
I don't subscribe to that line of thinking

[QLDriver]

What you can do is implement safety devices that reduce the risk of injury to the most important areas of the body - eg, HANS devices to reduce basal skull fractures, inflating body armour in motoGP and horse trials. But that single freak accident could still happen. Nothing could stop 150kgs of hard charging bike and rider from causing serious injuries to your abdomen, or a horse crushing you, unless you change the fundamental elements of the sport.
[...]
Instead of mitigating the risks born from budget test days by changing the design of the car, create legislation that will eliminate the track side processes that lead to this crash.

Absolutely! There is a middle ground to this - the sport doesn't necessarily need fundamental change for this, but I'd say that the accident chain needs examining to see what went wrong, and how those each of those risks can be mitigated.

Risk management and risk elimination are two different things.

[marcush.]

Well ,I can add something here.
working in the industry ,I had to commit to a safety and risk assessment training a few months ago and very obvioúsly a trailer with a taillift not either closed or down to the ground is a no-no in any company ....other for unloading or loading goods.
Secondly you are offered the concept of "last minute risk assessment" before starting any kind of work .True to it ,nobody realised the truck and it´s tail gate was a serious risk there ...and it may well be the guys had other things to do the thing was defective or whatever.

But it´s all sour grapes now .Maria has suffered considerable damage to her health and future life .....sad sad really .Yes Motorsport is dangerous but i´d think this is one of those things you´d expect to encounter when all involded are not taking things serious enough.

[aral]

Sadly, this thread has veered badly off-topic.
It is not about canopies, insurance etc, it is about MARIA, and her family.

[andartop]

Really sorry to hear Maria lost her eye, but grateful she is alive and stable. Hoping for a quick recovery, physically and psychologically.

With regards to canopies and safety bubbles, I believe a healthy approach would be to try and do something to prevent this from happening again, if possible, rather than try to do something to minimize the damage when it happens again. So, we really need to wait first until we find out more about why this happened.

[myurr]

This question was asked many times during the Senna/Prost/Berger era and the unthinkable happened. ANd then fans called it a freak event and still wanted their gladiators to be exposed to danger.
I don't subscribe to that line of thinking

So when do you stop asking that question? If canopies are fitted, the cars are slowed by 50mph, the wheels are covered, and every circuit has a 500m runoff, and someone still dies from a freak accident then where do you go? You can minimise risk all you like but you will never eliminate it until F1 is stopped in its entirety.

With the best will in the world you cannot legislate away a freak accident with a lorry on an unregulated test day that happened in circumstances that would never happen during a race weekend.

[pocketmoon]

Sorry if this has been said already but what the hell was the rear tail of the lorry doing down. Needless accident. Angry

but wishing her the best care the country can offer and as fast a recovery as humanly possible.

[mx_tifoso]

it's the most serious accident in the modern era yet it wasn't at a GP.

Massa might disagree with that. Let's wait and see what her outcome is before judging this to be the most serious accident of recent times.

I hate having been right on this occasion. I wish her all the best in life!

For one, straight line tests and similar outings need to be organized in a more professional manner. That means no lorries or similar vehicles standing about where they might be in the contact with F1 cars. This is something race cars are not designed to be around, so having them near the garage is extremely dangerous. It's quite simple in this case.

[siskue2005]

its time for introducing canope like this

[siskue2005]

Sadly, this thread has veered badly off-topic.
It is not about canopies, insurance etc, it is about MARIA, and her family.

we know that, but to to prevent future mishaps like Massa, Surtees jr and Maria, we should dicuss canopies

[strad]

NO!!!!!!!

[aral]

it's the most serious accident in the modern era yet it wasn't at a GP.

Massa might disagree with that. Let's wait and see what her outcome is before judging this to be the most serious accident of recent times.

I hate having been right on this occasion. I wish her all the best in life!

For one, straight line tests and similar outings need to be organized in a more professional manner. That means no lorries or similar vehicles standing about where they might be in the contact with F1 cars. This is something race cars are not designed to be around, so having them near the garage is extremely dangerous. It's quite simple in this case.

OK, I know that you are a mod, but did you not realise that this test was at Duxford, an open airfield site, as used by Top Gear. There are no garages. Cars and lorries just park at the side of the runways, but well away from the action. Maria was slowing down to pull up alongside the vehicles, well away from where she had been testing, when something went wrong. I would imagine that NO_ONE would have even the slightest reason to suspect that the car would go out of control. The collision was at a far lower speed than what was originally thought. It is estimated that the speed was in fact 20MPH.
It was a series of unfortunate coincidences, and as a Health and Safety inspector, I would say that whilst not perfect, the team were reasonably prudent. But you can never safeguard the possibility of a mechanical or human defect.
Speculation is dangerous and can affect proper investigation.

But i still believe that the thread should not be about causes, blame etc, but should be about Maria. Maybe a seperate thread is required for all the speculation?

[mx_tifoso]

OK, I know that you are a mod, .

That is completely and utterly irrelevant to anything being discussed here, especially in regards to what I've said.

And I understand that this was at an airbase, but they have temporary garages set up. So the lorries should be behind and out of sight. I'm sure something could have been done about this.

[Lycoming]

Top Gear films at Dunsfold, not Duxford.

Truthfully, I don't think that this incident should be used to argue for closed canopies; Yes, it would have helped, but it should not have been necessary. The engine should have been switched off as soon as the car was off the track, and pushed by hand from there on, or the lorries should have been parked further away; simple little things like that would have been adequate.

However, I consider myself an advocate for closed cockpits. I don't see how it degrades F1 racing. I do see how many close calls we've had in recent years, particularly Massa and Schumacher at Abu Dhabi. I do not understand the argument that there should be an element of danger. A closed cockpit does not eliminate the danger from the sport. To think that is ridiculous, to argue against them for that reason is inconceivable to me. If you have a closed cockpit and you crash into the wall in Monaco, YOU WILL HURT YOURSELF. And even if you had a closed cockpit, any normal person will crap their pants the second they sit inside one of those cars and give it so much as 50% throttle. It simply not a valid argument.

[aral]

OK, I know that you are a mod, .

That is completely and utterly irrelevant to anything being discussed here, especially in regards to what I've said.

And I understand that this was at an airbase, but they have temporary garages set up. So the lorries should be behind and out of sight. I'm sure something could have been done about this.

The lorries etc were the temporary garages, have a look at the published photos. Maria was well off the runway and returning to the temp. garage.
And to Lycoming, Top Gear do also use Duxford. That is where you see the vintage aircraft behind the cars.