Safety Tips from Race Car Drivers
Cautionary Lessons from Several Great Race Drivers
Amateur drivers who ignore such restrictions as seat-belt laws and speed limits could learn from several events in the lives of the racing drivers.
Many experts believe the Englishman Stirling Moss was the greatest racing driver in history, although Moss himself believes Juan-Manuel Fangio deserved that title. Both Fangio, Moss and the Belgian, Jacky Ickx won multiple Formula 1 Grand Prix races. Several incidents from their careers illustrate risks that ordinary drivers sometimes ignore when they get in a passenger car.
There was a story told once about either Moss or another famous driver, Juan-Manuel Fangio. Whoever it was, the story gives a clear sense of the masterful control great drivers have over any machine. In an on an oval track, Moss or Fangio (depending on the original source), was leading the other cars and had lapped several. Two of the lapped vehicles collided just past the turn at one end of the circuit. Although the two cars made it off the track, flames burst out, oil spilled all over the track and clouds of smoke arose. The audience screamed, knowing that the leader could not see what was coming up as he approached the turn. As the car came around the U of the curve it hit the oil slick.
The vehicle began spinning out of control as the audience watched, knowing that the great driver probably would crash as the others had. People screamed. On the third spin, everyone heard the driver downshift. As he came out of the last spin, he straightened out, drove straight ahead and won the race.
The bravery and control under extreme stress shows the marvelous qualities of this driver. However, Moss himself once commented that if he had a flat while driving an ordinary sedan at eighty miles an hour on a typical highway, he did not believe he could control the car. If one of the greatest race drivers of all time could not recover from such a possible event, how much chance does each reader think they would have in a similar situation? Perhaps this is an argument for slowing down a bit?
The Le Mans auto endurance race, officially called the “24 Hours of Le Mans,” until 1970 used a method to begin the race called the Le Mans Start. In this system, the cars were lined up on one side of the track and the drivers on the other. When the starter’s flag dropped the drivers ran for their cars, jumped in, and took off.
This style of starting went on even after seat harness was introduced. Jacky Ickx, a young Belgian driver, decided to protest this practice in his first Le Mans race. Instead of racing to his car with the other drivers, he calmly strolled across the track, sat down, and carefully fastened his harness. Another driver, John Woolfe, with an unfastened harness, was killed in the first lap. Ickx, despite starting in the last position and with an outmoded vehicle, finished first twenty-four hours later. He went on to win five more Le Mans endurance races. After the first race, driving back to Paris in a Porsche, he was in an accident but was not hurt because he was wearing his seat belt. This seems like a good less in never forgetting to fasten seat belts no matter how short the trip.
