Formula 1's forgotten man: 20 years on from the death of Roland Ratzenberger

[edition.cnn.com]


" Perfection is not a gift ....... it comes with practice."

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As I said in another forum, Ratzenberger's crash was way more brutal, explicit and terrifying than Senna's. It really demonstrated that those cars were rockets strong as toothpicks. But I like to think that both he and Ayrton, by sacrificing themselves, saved a lot of lives in these 20 years.

Who knows what kind of driver Roland was. We could've lost two champions that day without realising. And any lost life in a race is a tremendous loss for the sport. Not only Roland and Ayrton, but all the other drivers who perished (even in recent years).

RIP Roland. We haven't forgotten and we will never forget.



Stats: 139 Starts / 7 Wins / 9 Poles / 5 Fastest laps

A very good read from David Brabham, Roland's teammate that weekend: David Brabham Blog: Imola 1994

Quote
Carlitox
It really demonstrated that those cars were rockets strong as toothpicks. But I like to think that both he and Ayrton, by sacrificing themselves, saved a lot of lives in these 20 years.

With the exception of Senna's alleged steering column failure (which I'm still in absolutely no doubt caused the accident), the cars themselves held up quite well (as did Wendlinger's at Monaco). I'd imagine Roland would have had some fractures, and the small hole punched in the side obviously wasn't great, but the chassis, from a safety point of view, remained intact. Senna's car suffered a tear in the chassis at the front of the cockpit, but again it largely remained intact.

To my knowledge, the common factor in the death of both drivers was the low cockpit sides - Ratzenberger may well have been fine had they used the cockpit sides of 1995 and 1996, one of the measures introduced due to Interlagos as much as Imola and Monaco, and Senna's was a freak accident which may well have been avoided with higher cockpit sides, but really it was just a freak.


You don't see damage on cars to the extent of those, not so much because of the cars strength (remember they are designed to deform and eventually rip much of the sides from the car during accidents of the type of those at Imola) but because the circuits are designed not to have anything to hit. Of course, had Kubica had his accident 10 or possibly even 5 years before, he'd not be with us, but that was an accident as brutal as any I've seen in F1 - far worse than Senna's and possibly worse than Ratzenberger's.

Gav, that Brabs piece was great. Echoed his comments from the SkyF1 documentary - The Last Team-mate, which was excellent.

Roland's death was caused by a mixture of the low cockpit sides, as well as with hitting a concrete wall at high speed. He had no chance.

As we've since found, Senna's death was a freak accident. Of the big accidents at Tamburello over the years, his was probably the least violent. Alboreto, Berger, and Piquet all had huge smashes there which looked far worse. I believe Piquet's head actually struck the wall, and Berger was fortunate not to burn to death.

F1's attitude to safety had become so cavalier at that stage that it is not surprising that the accidents happened as they did. Look at some of the accidents seen in the late 80s/90s. There are those I've already mentioned, as well as Streiff's smash that left him paralysed, and Donnelly's accident, which literally saw the Lotus disintegrate.

Then take a look at the early part of the 1994 season to see Lehto, Alesi, Lamy, Wendliger, Montermini - the later three post Imola - all injured as a result of big accidents. The cars had simply become to fast, and the move to ban driver aids had left them frighteningly dangerous.

Ultimately, the two deaths at Imola gave F1 a well needed kick up the arse, and while there are those that complain that the safety changes went to far, with track after track castrated - even Eau Rouge had a chicane slapped right in the middle of it that year - we have thankfully not see a casualty in the sport since.

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Races: 163 - Wins: 23 - Pole Positions: 24 - Fastest Laps: 22
Season 9: Constructors' Champions

Cracking article by David Brabham, and beautifully complements his engaging part in The Last Teammate. I never lacked respect for him, but my respect for him is considerable now. And he's right - partly because he lost his life on the same weekend as Senna, his name will perhaps be remembered better than if he hadn't, so he's not really the forgotten man at all. I for one feel that way anyway.

RIP Roland, always.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/01/2014 01:10AM by EC83.

People like Paletti are forgotten (though he was killed in the shadow of Villeneuve's death), so I think if anything Ratzenberger's memory is actually heightened by being killed the day before Senna, and the endless list of nasties at Imola.

1994 had some horrible, horrible accidents, but I'm not sure the cars were too fast, but the drivers (and perhaps teams) had certainly become too cavalier. Look at Irvine at Interlagos (I still don't understand how Brundle survived taking a F1 car on the head), Hill ending up upside down in a practice session, the number of spins and crashes between drivers (and to be fair, a lot of the drivers were pay-drivers, perhaps without the ability/common sense of some being kept out), the pit fires and accidents in 1994 and 1995. Even the weather (and FIA?) was conspiring at times (that poor marshal at Suzuka).

There are very few redeeming features of 1994 (Mansell's 2 poles and win, Ferrari... is that it?). Looking back, it was an incredibly dark year.

I fear, and I think this is something Jackie Stewart alluded to a few years back, that we've returned to where we were back then - F1 is so "safe" that the drivers have a feeling of invincibility. Coulthard and Wurz, Grosjean and Alonso, Schumacher and Liuzzi, Webber and Kovalainen, Hamilton and Kobayashi, Trulli and Chandhok - we've had some very, very scary near misses in recent years.

To be honest, between Villeneuve, Paletti and De Angelis we saw so horrorific crashes during those nearby years: Berger, Imola 1989; Warwick, Monza 1990; Donnelly, Jerez 1990; Caffi, Montecarlo 1991; Zanardi, Spa 1993. All those crashes looks more shocking and fatal at first, but all those guys are still alive.

Villeneuve, Paletti, De Angelis, Ratzenberger, Senna and all the others before them... each one must be remembered as drivers. Nothing more, nothing less...

My workthread with all RELEASED and WIP stuff





Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/01/2014 02:37PM by Rot Teufel.

The fact that we haven't had a f1 driver fatality for 20 years now is simply amazing.

But people are right, There should still be no room for complacency because technically we have had a driver fatality. I fear it's been largely ignored because of who it was and the circumstances of how it happened. But there's no escaping the fact that Maria de Villota was testing a contemporary F1, for a current F1 team when she had her horrible accident. Of course she made a recovery and survived for some months after the accident but her eventual death was attributed to the injuries she had sustained.

And as Gav alludes to we should not forget the marshals, I think we've lost at least two in debris related accident since Imola 1994, as well as a third in a tragic and completely avoidable vehicle recovery accident.

And then, there's other series, Indycar, NASCAR and MotoGp to name but a few have have some very high profile driver fatality and last year we lost a driver at Le Mans.

The Grim Reaper still very much keeps a watching brief over every motor race.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/01/2014 08:46PM by Alesi no1.

The case of Roger Williamson and David Purley, Piers Courage, Lorenzo Bandini... I think that those men are forgotten in the F1 too... Although at that time the death in F1 was something... Normal... For lack of safety.

Roger Williamson's death irks me more than most in that his death was entirely preventable. He was alive in that car, and only one driver stopped to help. The race could have been stopped to allow the fire truck to drive against the flow of traffic (instead of it having to do a full lap of the track). Many find Jackie Stewart hard to dislike and applaud his safety crusade, but he was very much missing in action that day, being one of those to carry on racing while poor David Purley tried to flag his peers down to help him attempt to save Roger's life.

Bandini's as tragic as it was brutal in that his pregnant wife miscarried soon after his passing. While injuries and death in motor-racing usually makes us fans reflect, it's often hard to associate with the grieving family members, but I challenge anyone to look up the story of the poor Bandini's and not shed tears.

gav Wrote:
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> There are very few redeeming features of 1994
> (Mansell's 2 poles and win, Ferrari... is that
> it?). Looking back, it was an incredibly dark
> year.

Mansell had the one Pole, but yeah, his and Berger's wins were probably the only highlights. It must, on balance, be the blackest F1 season ever, not just for all the tragic accidents, but also for Benetton's utter disregard for and widespread breakage of the rules - without which, of course, the pit fire at Hockenheim never would've happened either. Disaster piled on disaster. So much of it was circumstantial and freak too, as has been touched on many times.
I think it was a combination of things - as Ferrari2007 pointed out and I can't help but agree to an extent, the combination of the removal of driver-aids and the failure to slow the cars down accordingly did make them more dangerous, I can't help but feel. Maybe, once the speeds and forces involved in racing a car go beyond a critical point, "freak" accidents become more commonplace. It happened in the late 60s/early 70s, when the cars were transformed and revolutionised in terms of performance without safety keeping up, and there were some of the darkest years in F1 history in terms of accidents.
I think the exact same thing happened in 94 - and, yeah, the attitude towards racing was too complacent, that must've played a part too, I think you're right. The drivers had been used to the electronic driver aids, the cars had gotten much faster over the last couple of seasons since the majority of them had last been "passive". The last few seasons had been the safest and happiest in F1 history up to that point. Suddenly the cars became much harder to drive with greater forces involved, and BANG.
It's sheer guesswork on my part, but it's the only logical explanation, IMO, for the sudden spate of horrific accidents after years of basically nothing.

Even now, not only can I not watch that San Marino GP, but I can't really watch any race from that season and enjoy it.

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Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/02/2014 01:35AM by EC83.

Quote
EC83
Mansell had the one Pole

I remember him holding pole at Magny-Cours too. Hill must have beaten his time later.

Yeah, Hill pipped Mansell to pole at France.

I'm not convinced that the driver aids played a big part in the accidents to be honest, sure it made some of the cars more unstable. But F1 had survived some truly massive accidents in the preceding years when most of the field were without all these gizmos like the semi auto, active suspension, traction control, abs braking. It was only really in 1993 that these technologies were becoming more wide spread.

But the speeds and forces of the accidents would have been the same with or without the driver aids. The removal of driver aids may have made the loss of driver control more likely but they didn't alter the impact of an accident.

The real problem was the complacency. Cars were considered to be strong because of the carbon fibre aspect and some truly remarkable escapes, but the car and track layouts retained some huge hazards. Which only really started to be addressed after the accidents at Imola.

Since then the safety has undergone and continues to undergo a total overhaul, track layout, and run off areas, pit-lane speed limits, protective clothing, driver cell/cockpit, deformable structure/crumple zones, head protection, wheel tethers, deformable suspension the list goes on.

It's ironic that fate of Roland and Ayrton provided the catalyst for all of those changes, just one of the isolated would have prevented either of their fatalities.

But accidents are un predictable, and they should never stop researching, and developing the safety design to further reduce the risk of injury in accidents.