The drivers are afraid
At the end of the Melbourne race, it was the world champion Lando Norris who made a heartfelt appeal to the FIA for a radical and timely modification of the regulations on the safety issue: “There will be a big accident and it will be a shame, something will go terribly wrong. Depending on what each driver does, you can have differences of 30, 40 or 50 km/h. And if you hit a car with this delta you fly away, you end up against the fences and you get very hurt, and you risk doing it to others too. And it’s a horrible thing to think about.”
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And what happened at the start between Liam Lawson, practically stationary on the grid, and Franco Colapinto, who was arriving under acceleration, was the vivid example of a mega accident avoided by a whisker. An accident dynamic, that of taking off due to a large speed difference, which in the history of Formula 1 has repeatedly led to disastrous outcomes.
Perez and Sainz support Norris’s appeal
In this regard, it is interesting to isolate the statements made by Sergio Perez and Carlos Sainz on the Thursday in Shanghai, given that we are talking about drivers who have raced a total of 512 Grands Prix.
Perez emphasized: “It’s sad to say, but it’s only a matter of time before a serious accident occurs. When someone has an anti-stall like what happened to Lawson it can be very dangerous, because the speeds reached in the space of two or three seconds are extreme. I don’t know exactly what can be done, but these new engines are very difficult to start.”
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Carlos Sainz was on the same page as his colleague: “We all saw what happened at the start. This year the starts are difficult and the drivers further back arrive at higher speeds. There are two major safety dangers; besides the start, there are the situations seen both in testing and in Melbourne regarding slow-downs. We were incredibly lucky that nothing happened to Liam and Franco, but I have the feeling that there will be one of those very serious accidents if we don’t change something about the starts. Fingers crossed.”
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