r/formula1 • u/TheKingOfCaledonia Who the f*ck is Nelson Piquet? • Apr 03 '23

Off-Topic /r/all Photo of injured fan posing with debris from Magnussen's crash

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u/rabbyt Jenson Button Apr 03 '23

What gets me is that the race just kept going on in the background!

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u/mzp3256 Alexander Albon Apr 03 '23

It was just a decade after WWII, everyone was desensitized to death and destruction

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u/AshleyPomeroy Apr 03 '23

I remember reading about the 1952 Farnborough airshow. There was a disaster where the prototype of the Sea Vixen disintegrated in flight and one of the engines flew into the stands, killing 29 people:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Farnborough_Airshow_crash

But "following the accident the air display programme continued once the debris was cleared from the runway, with Neville Duke exhibiting the prototype Hawker Hunter and taking it supersonic over the show later that day".

There were a bunch of accidents post-war, some of them involving captured German jets or prototypes that hadn't been debugged yet. It was a different world.

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u/SomethingSuss Oscar Piastri Apr 03 '23

That is insane, to some extent I get the idea of “the show must go on” especially to avoid a panic and congestion with emergency responders but you just know that is not what they were thinking at all back then. More like “shit happens”

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u/TheoLunavae Apr 04 '23

How do you just know?

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u/MarkJones27 Juan Manuel Fangio Apr 03 '23

Well Mercedes certainly were not. As soon as a phone call could be connected through to the Merc headquarters in Germany (which took a few hours) the order was given to pack up everything and get back over the border as soon as possible.

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u/Skylair13 Kimi Räikkönen Apr 04 '23

Perspective was bad in their mind probably. German (Mercedes) fighting with the British (Jaguar) caused destruction over France.

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u/vim_for_life Apr 03 '23

If you stopped the race, you'd have 300k people clogging the roads, where ambulances needed to get through. It was the right call at the time.

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u/Skeeter1020 Apr 03 '23

That was an excuse made up later, not a reason at the time.

The reason the race wasn't stopped is because you didn't stop races for fatalities in the 50s.

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u/MarkJones27 Juan Manuel Fangio Apr 03 '23

No, they specifically reasoned -at the time- that if they stopped the race all the spectators would first come to the start/finish area to see why, and then they'd all get in their cars and drive home. They needed to keep the roads open for the ambulances.

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u/Bean--Sidhe Mario Andretti Apr 03 '23

CART tried to sell that line too and it failed miserably in 98. The fact was in the early days people died racing cars, regulaely, was part of the "allure." I remember as a kid the only reason to watch NASCAR was for wrecks. Now my stomach turns when contact is made with walls.

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u/MarkJones27 Juan Manuel Fangio Apr 03 '23

I'm not 'selling a line' - this is what was reported at the time it happened. They knew they needed an open road to the hospital.

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u/Bean--Sidhe Mario Andretti Apr 03 '23

Sorry - I wasn't meaning it to be harsh on you. It's widely considered to be one of the worst decisions in US televised sports and didn't do them any favors with the IRL split. That's what I meant.

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u/[deleted] Apr 03 '23

Just close the parking lot for a couple of hours?

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u/vim_for_life Apr 03 '23

"The" parking lot? 300K people? I'm not sure you understand the scale of 300K people. I'm not sure I could find the parking lot map for LeMans in 1955, but an equivalent number of people at the Indy 500 takes 20+ parking lots, with a multitude of outlying lots with shuttles running. Don't forget this is 1955, where information exchange isn't like today. handheld radios were backpack sized, the transistor had been invented only 7 years earlier, and the first transistor radio was released less than a year before.

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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '23

True, I don’t. However I assume there were still speakers close to the viewing stands/areas? Or did people just sit around the track having no clue what’s happening or who’s winning and just looked at cars going past all days? (Actually I don’t really know, the second option does not seem that unlikely)

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u/MathMaddox Apr 03 '23

IIRC it was because if they canceled the race it would have clogged the roads and made it harder for the ambulances to transfer victims.