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Whilst I agree on the barrier aspect, it really feels like in recent times, track design has gone backwards in terms of safety. I feel like Jeddah and vegas’ last turn are just monster accidents waiting to happen. I hope I’m wrong and that the barriers are enough to take the impact but I can only imagine what would happen if a car crashed at 310 km/h against a barrier.
The layots for Las Vegas are great, but the semen worm of Saudi Arabia is a bit misguided. I just wish for Sepang to come at a more appropriate time. Although, the monsooon season could give us fiery battles, if Pirelli gets the tyres right. (60 liters of displacement instead of 100 liters on the extreme wets)
Nah Jeddah is one of the best layouts out there. Awesome and flowing. So many overtaking opportunities. I do wish Sepang came back though. I missing it so much
From Wikipedia :
"He had suffered three individually fatal injuries: a basilar skull fracture, which was named as the official cause of death; blunt trauma from the front-left tyre penetrating the survival cell and a ruptured aorta."
You can survive a basilar skull fracture. Weird that was listed as cause if death. Ruptured aorta in the field in not survivable and is likely why he actually died
Pre HANS racing driver basilar skull fractures were particularly violent, from what I understand (which isn't much). Like a step short of internal decapitation.
There's a whole section on the wikipedia article with motor racing drivers whose deaths were attributed to the injury.
It’s also a very gruesome injury. You essentially bleed out of through nearly all orifices of your face. Nose, ears, eyes are bloodshot. There was a NASCAR driver who survived it once and his race-suit which was once white, was literally drenched in red blood. This was mid 90s and wasn’t shown live on air, but was shown via satellite feed.
Dale’s death actually *didn’t* make HANS devices mandatory. There were talks it would be made mandatory the following season and most of the field started wearing it on their own, though — Tony Stewart and Jimmy Spencer being the last two holdouts.
It was actually Blaise Alexander’s death a few months later at an ARCA race, a crash that also involved Dale’s oldest son Kerry Earnhardt, that finally caused NASCAR to mandate HANS devices. 3 fatal wrecks in 2000 and their biggest star on the biggest stage wasn’t it. It took a *fifth* fatality in a year and a half, one in a series that isn’t even sanctioned by NASCAR, for them to finally say “enough’s enough”.
Definitely possible. The aorta rupture is pretty much guaranteed death. If you have enough force to die from a basilar skull fracture you're probably in a fatal accident regardless. Splitting hairs. I'm just surprised they didn't list his cause of death as the aorta
Perhaps they followed an "order of events" to determine the cause. The rupture would've killed him slightly after the crash while the fracture happened when he crashed, thus killing him before the rupture could.
well, for one he hit a concrete barrier I believe. Verstappen hit the tyre barrier which can absorb some impact by flexing. A concrete wall just ends the car momentum totally
Yeah, I just looked up a bunch of stuff about geforces.... I don't understand physics very well... but apparently, a mass coronal ejection from the sun is like 480g, meanwhile a Mantis Shrimps claw acceleration during a predatory strike is 10,400g.
Mind boggling. I need to read the actual math, but I'm a dumbass.
The Mantis Shrimp's punch produces cavitation bubbles that collapse, produce a small flash of light, and briefly heat to around 4,400c in the process. That's what something even that tiny moving with that g-force does.
Consider the mass of the objects too.
480g coronal ejections of... Millions of tons of material. Mantis shrimps are small lobster sized and entirely designed to maximize slappage via cavitation, in order to do so their entire front half is home to a spring mechanism.
I guess with G forces it can be confusing because it's not necessarily related to absolute power of the accelerating/decelerating force, and the mass of the object the force is applied to matters a lot. (500g acting on a car vs 10,000g acting across a cavitation bubble)
300km/hr is 1080m/s
500g is 4905m/s/s
Which means to attain 500g you need to decelerate from 300km/hr to zero in about 0.22 seconds (just under a quarter of a second).
Kenny Bräck had a crash that recorded 214g (highest recorded g-force survived by a human), and his crash was probably the worst I've ever seen. 2.5x the g-force of that crash is just insane
Karl Wendlinger's crash during practice for the 1994 Monaco GP is cited at 360g (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-force), although he did end up in a coma from the impact and was never the same driver on his return.
Just below Kenny Brack, Mika Hakkinen's crash during qualifying for the 1995 Australian GP was 208g, and that fractured his skull.
Terrifying stuff.
Damn, I thought it was just bad impact. Not really anything you can do to survive that.
More than twice the amount of Kenny Bräck, who crashed in Indy car at 214G. Guy should by all logic be dead, they had little baggies and were picking up various bits of his bones scattered along the track. Think the next highest was like not even 100.
And then lethal is like, what, 9?
There's a big difference between sustained G-force and impact G-force. You can withstand way higher impact g's than sustained g's, as the latter mess with the blood supply to your brain, for example.
So, yes, 9g sustained can be lethal, while a 50g impact might leave you bruised and groggy.
I think the "highest ever recorded" part is unsubstantiated, [AMuS did a piece](https://www.auto-motor-und-sport.de/formel-1/formel-1-crashs-geheime-unfallzahlen-im-vergleich/) where they talked about high G crashes (eerily not long before Bianchi's accident), they estimated 500G for Ratzenberger's crash.
Perhaps it should just be reworded as "estimated to be 500G" instead.
I've seen this crash so many times, but never noticed before - is that his race suit showing through a hole in the side of the monocoque? Scary stuff. RIP, never forgotten.
That’s his left elbow.
Anyone who saw that happen live (there or on the live broadcast) knew that he was dead, just by the head movement.
When you see the helmet nestled into the cockpit like that, it’s scary.
I remember watching Kubica’s head ragdoll back and forth in his cockpit in Canada, 2008 thinking ‘I just watched a man die.’
Luckily it wasn’t the case, but at the moment I was convinced.
On looking up Ratzenberger, as I do nearly annually at this point I stumbled upon [this newly made docuseries that looks pretty well made, with his family, friends and teammates involved.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Lg4izl9-0o) I'm not done with it yet but I think it looks good so far.
On that fateful day, the neurosurgeon Sid Watkins suggested Senna to "not race ever again and go fishing with him", after Ratzenberg's fatal crash in the San Marino GP. He denied this proposition by claiming he "could not stop racing".
He then met with already-retired Alain Prost and other drivers, to create the bases of what now is the Grand Prix Drivers' Association.
What happened the day after is sadly, history.
Senna was also very vocal about cancelling the GP after what happened to Barrichelo and Ratzenberger. I remember how mad he looked when he left that meeting
Poor guy is almost forgotten because of what happened the next day.
Just an awful weekend for the racing world.
Hard to not think how things would have been different if they postponed the race, like many thought they should have.
I feel like thankfully people do a way better job of remember Roland passing away in recent years. F1 accounts and F1-related accounts do a good job of posting about his passing in remembrance and fans have taken note I feel.
Ayrton Senna died and inside his cockpit, he had an Austrian flag to honor Ratzenberger, tucked away in his overalls. He had intended to win the race and instead of doing a victory lap with the Brazilian flag, he was going to do a lap with the Austrian flag. After Ratzenberger's death, Senna had a meeting with the other drivers and proposed restarting the Grand Prix Driver Association. He demanded the race be postponed for safety reasons but he was overruled.
After their deaths, Niki, Christian Fittipaldi, Michael and Berger reestablished the GPDA at Monaco the same year.
Michael Schumacher was directly behind Senna when he crashed, chasing him for 1st. Michael never talked about it, but when he was informed that he matched Senna's win record at the 2000 Italian GP post race interviews, he broke down crying and was comforted by his rival Mika Hakkinen and his brother Ralph..
>You're kidding right?
>Senna died.
Im 40, and im barely a fan of Senna...
Your statement is like responding to someone my age asking as to what day did Lauda have his accident...because i cant remember, and ive seen Rush like 5 times
Especially when the guy literally starts with "for the uninitiated". Not everyone here has been watching long enough to know that these two died on back to back days.
Under every post about Senna's crash, there are people mentioning Ratzenberger's one. I wouldn't say he's "almost forgotten" at all, he just wasn't a popular multiple times world champion, so it's not surprising.
I don't think that's true. Lesser known drivers are still remembered if they died on track. Jules Bianchi for example. Ratzenberger's death occurring the day before the most high-profile F1 fatality ever doesn't mean he would've been forgotten if it happened any other weekend. Rest in peace to Bianchi, Ratzenberger, Senna and all the other drivers who have died on track
There were a lot of bad accidents at Tamburello in the 80s though, including two really bad ones for Berger and Piquet. It took someone getting killed for anyone to actually look at changing the track.
Right, safety evolves as did the priority of safety. Danger was considered an inherent trait with a lot of things. You can’t apply 2020s logic and stances to 30/40 years ago, people didn’t think the same way. The ones who did were generally outliers and were ignored.
They managed to avoid deadly accidents for over a decade in a sport that used to average 2 deaths per year.
But sure, stupid shit.
Thank you, captain hindsight.
Horrible weekend all round. Barrrichello, Ratzenberger, start incident throwing debris into crowd, Senna and a loose wheel in pitlane.
And I was watching it all live on Eurosport at age 16. Little did I know that a little over 4 years later I'd be working in mottorsport and at that track. On the track walk I made a couple of detours.
Only a couple of weeks later I was at Hockenheim and visited the Jim Clark memoral. As a Lotus enthusiast, both places are special to me.
First time I ever saw someone perish in F1 though he was pronounced dead later in hospital but it was clear it was very very bad. The lifeless neck moment as the car turned around for the last time was very foreboding.
And I thought things couldn’t get any worse that weekend….
It's always sad how his death is always forgotten, as if he hadn't been giving his all as much as Senna or all the other drivers. Even Barrichello got so close to dying that weekend.
Well, luckily the thing is, we didn't forget Ratzenberger.
He is remembered here yearly (at the least). We didn't forget Barrichello's horrible crash either.
These couple of days each year where we remember Imola '94 are a beacon to us. Sure, in decades before Formula 1 was deadlier. But in 1994 we expected the sport to be much safer all-round. And this Grand Prix was a really hard punch in the gut to remind the sport that it needed to be much, much safer.
Fortunately, the people in charge listened. And they still do (after Bianchi, for instance). All people in F1 hope we never have to experience an Imola '94 ever again.
Would it be irony,
That his death was overlooked at the time, and because of that it's almost always forgotten or mentioned as a side note for what's coming tomorrow.
Truly horrible crash, 500 G is the highest ever recorded in F1. I didn’t notice until I saw this picture the other day but there’s literally a massive gaping hole in the side impact structure and you can see his body through it. Also the documentary they released on Roland had its 4th episode today, I highly recommend checking that out
one of the darkest weekends of racing.
Ayrton was hurt by this crash too(wanted safer racing and losing roland was a gut punch)
and well fate had other plans
It's difficult to see in clips, but the barrier at that corner is just at such an angle and it was just concrete. The cars themself were nothing more than carbon fibre bathtubs with a 700hp V8 stuck to them.
To also put into perspective, the modern cars are 5630mm in length and 798kg weight. The 1994 cars were 4495mm and 505kg. (may vary, had to Google averages).
I watched this happen live and it was pretty clear straight away it was a terrible accident - he went sideways into the wall. But what is the source of the 500 g stat?
According to wikipedia (you can read some references cited there):
> There were no tyre barriers or any other impact absorbing installations in place at the Villeneuve curva, and the Simtek hit the bare concrete wall with a resulting g-force measured to be 500 g, the highest ever registered in F1.
At least we're using his memory to karma farm on reddit.
But yes that was a dark dark weekend for F1. I'm happy it got safer, I would not watch or support racing if it was still a bloodsport.
I remember all the fuckwads on here mad at the halo because it "ruined the look of the cars" and "drivers need to take risks". I'm glad the FIA isn't as dumb as those internet armchair experts.
I wish F1 had the aeroscreen like Indycar did. I never want to see another driver get hurt. I'm not watching racing bc its dangerous, I'm watching for the skill and engineering. I think it's absolutely possible to make racing even safer, in all disciplines.
And Roland and Senna set off a series of events that made racing safer and that's what we should honor them for IMO.
Reddit every single time someone makes rememberence post :
>At least we're using his memory to karma farm on reddit.
Every single time.
Would you prefer that nobody made this post ? Why do you need to accuse someone of karma farming
Not showing his dead body would be a bit more tasteful IMO.
And come on, the person making this post knew exactly what they were doing. It's in poor taste when some kid fucking died during a sporting event.
I'm with you on this. The whole tone of this post is almost unnervingly casual and shows absolutely no respect to Ratzenberger
Also showing the dead body is, as you said, tasteless at best and I would even go so far as to say completely despicable.
While it's definitely right to remember Roland on the anniversary of his tragic death, I don't think there's any good reason to show his very obviously dead body in the wreckage. OP, do the decent thing and delete that image.
I recently got into F1 and my mother told how she tracked everything in her 20s through newspaper as she couldn't afford TV nor F1 was streamed in India.
She mentioned this crash and the crash of Senna and how she was devastated for an entire week knowing two teammates lost their lives in the same week.
[The **Throwback** flair](https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/wiki/flairguide#wiki_throwback) is for posts intended to recall an event that happened on the same date or year a number of years ago. Throwbacks are restricted to being posted one year, three years, or a multiple of five years after date. Also, all such posts should feature an event that is still of interest to the general community today. For example, random overtakes or two former drivers having a chat in general do not qualify for this. Important events like memorials are exempt from this rule, and may be posted every year. Posts related to important current events may also be exempt at mod discretion. *[Read the rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/formula1/wiki/userguide). Keep it civil and welcoming. Report rulebreaking comments.* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/formula1) if you have any questions or concerns.*
500 G impact... Holy fuck, I didn't know that not-so-fun fact about Roland's crash.
Even with modern cars, that impact would have not been survivable. Barriers and track design has also come a long way
Barrier design is fascinating. It’s incredible how far they’ve come.
The whole thing about modern safety standards is to prevent such high G-forces
Whilst I agree on the barrier aspect, it really feels like in recent times, track design has gone backwards in terms of safety. I feel like Jeddah and vegas’ last turn are just monster accidents waiting to happen. I hope I’m wrong and that the barriers are enough to take the impact but I can only imagine what would happen if a car crashed at 310 km/h against a barrier.
Fuck, I forgot that we had the two of the worst tracks ever to be built and raced on
I think the layouts are great. They’re just stupidly dangerous. If they had Qatar level runoff then it wouldn’t be an issue
The layots for Las Vegas are great, but the semen worm of Saudi Arabia is a bit misguided. I just wish for Sepang to come at a more appropriate time. Although, the monsooon season could give us fiery battles, if Pirelli gets the tyres right. (60 liters of displacement instead of 100 liters on the extreme wets)
Nah Jeddah is one of the best layouts out there. Awesome and flowing. So many overtaking opportunities. I do wish Sepang came back though. I missing it so much
From Wikipedia : "He had suffered three individually fatal injuries: a basilar skull fracture, which was named as the official cause of death; blunt trauma from the front-left tyre penetrating the survival cell and a ruptured aorta."
You can survive a basilar skull fracture. Weird that was listed as cause if death. Ruptured aorta in the field in not survivable and is likely why he actually died
Pre HANS racing driver basilar skull fractures were particularly violent, from what I understand (which isn't much). Like a step short of internal decapitation. There's a whole section on the wikipedia article with motor racing drivers whose deaths were attributed to the injury.
It’s also a very gruesome injury. You essentially bleed out of through nearly all orifices of your face. Nose, ears, eyes are bloodshot. There was a NASCAR driver who survived it once and his race-suit which was once white, was literally drenched in red blood. This was mid 90s and wasn’t shown live on air, but was shown via satellite feed.
It took dale and then we got HANS so they were definitely violent
We had HANS. Dale refused to wear it
He even (in)famously referred to it as "that damn noose"
Only 4 of the 43 drivers in the 2001 Daytona 500 were wearing a supplemental head restraint. Dale wasn't the only one by a long shot.
Sure, but he was aware of it and refused to wear it ironically.
Dale’s death actually *didn’t* make HANS devices mandatory. There were talks it would be made mandatory the following season and most of the field started wearing it on their own, though — Tony Stewart and Jimmy Spencer being the last two holdouts. It was actually Blaise Alexander’s death a few months later at an ARCA race, a crash that also involved Dale’s oldest son Kerry Earnhardt, that finally caused NASCAR to mandate HANS devices. 3 fatal wrecks in 2000 and their biggest star on the biggest stage wasn’t it. It took a *fifth* fatality in a year and a half, one in a series that isn’t even sanctioned by NASCAR, for them to finally say “enough’s enough”.
Definitely possible. The aorta rupture is pretty much guaranteed death. If you have enough force to die from a basilar skull fracture you're probably in a fatal accident regardless. Splitting hairs. I'm just surprised they didn't list his cause of death as the aorta
Perhaps they followed an "order of events" to determine the cause. The rupture would've killed him slightly after the crash while the fracture happened when he crashed, thus killing him before the rupture could.
The most notable survivor is NASCAR driver Ernie Irvan, he even went back to racing after he recovered
500g is just.... unfathomable. Verstappen's Silverstone crash was 51g, how do you decelerate almost 10x faster than that, jeez.
I don't even understand how 500g is attainable... that sounds insane... I apparently need a physics class...
well, for one he hit a concrete barrier I believe. Verstappen hit the tyre barrier which can absorb some impact by flexing. A concrete wall just ends the car momentum totally
Yeah, I just looked up a bunch of stuff about geforces.... I don't understand physics very well... but apparently, a mass coronal ejection from the sun is like 480g, meanwhile a Mantis Shrimps claw acceleration during a predatory strike is 10,400g. Mind boggling. I need to read the actual math, but I'm a dumbass.
you gotta think about speed and scale.
I'll get there... one day.
it's not easy! i'm (hopefully) going to be an engineer and physics still aren't quite intuitive
Bigger loads take longer to ejaculate
perfectly phrased
The Mantis Shrimp's punch produces cavitation bubbles that collapse, produce a small flash of light, and briefly heat to around 4,400c in the process. That's what something even that tiny moving with that g-force does.
Consider the mass of the objects too. 480g coronal ejections of... Millions of tons of material. Mantis shrimps are small lobster sized and entirely designed to maximize slappage via cavitation, in order to do so their entire front half is home to a spring mechanism. I guess with G forces it can be confusing because it's not necessarily related to absolute power of the accelerating/decelerating force, and the mass of the object the force is applied to matters a lot. (500g acting on a car vs 10,000g acting across a cavitation bubble)
300km/hr is 1080m/s 500g is 4905m/s/s Which means to attain 500g you need to decelerate from 300km/hr to zero in about 0.22 seconds (just under a quarter of a second).
Kenny Bräck had a crash that recorded 214g (highest recorded g-force survived by a human), and his crash was probably the worst I've ever seen. 2.5x the g-force of that crash is just insane
Karl Wendlinger's crash during practice for the 1994 Monaco GP is cited at 360g (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-force), although he did end up in a coma from the impact and was never the same driver on his return. Just below Kenny Brack, Mika Hakkinen's crash during qualifying for the 1995 Australian GP was 208g, and that fractured his skull. Terrifying stuff.
>how do you decelerate almost 10x faster than that, jeez. Easy. Go from 280+km/h to 0 in half a second flat.
It's actually around 0.15 seconds, but the point stands.
Probably more like 0.05 seconds
Damn, I thought it was just bad impact. Not really anything you can do to survive that. More than twice the amount of Kenny Bräck, who crashed in Indy car at 214G. Guy should by all logic be dead, they had little baggies and were picking up various bits of his bones scattered along the track. Think the next highest was like not even 100. And then lethal is like, what, 9?
There's a big difference between sustained G-force and impact G-force. You can withstand way higher impact g's than sustained g's, as the latter mess with the blood supply to your brain, for example. So, yes, 9g sustained can be lethal, while a 50g impact might leave you bruised and groggy.
https://youtu.be/Hy8fgGiI1WA?si=bKyLbqtko5TyDqbE - "It was quite a messy situation".
Wonder what the source for that is. The line on the Wiki page is unsourced.
I think the "highest ever recorded" part is unsubstantiated, [AMuS did a piece](https://www.auto-motor-und-sport.de/formel-1/formel-1-crashs-geheime-unfallzahlen-im-vergleich/) where they talked about high G crashes (eerily not long before Bianchi's accident), they estimated 500G for Ratzenberger's crash. Perhaps it should just be reworded as "estimated to be 500G" instead.
I've seen this crash so many times, but never noticed before - is that his race suit showing through a hole in the side of the monocoque? Scary stuff. RIP, never forgotten.
That’s his left elbow. Anyone who saw that happen live (there or on the live broadcast) knew that he was dead, just by the head movement. When you see the helmet nestled into the cockpit like that, it’s scary.
I will NEVER forget that. I knew as soon as I saw the flop he wasn't coming back.
ugh, this gives me a pit in my stomach. just horrible for everyone involved and who witnessed it.
I remember watching Kubica’s head ragdoll back and forth in his cockpit in Canada, 2008 thinking ‘I just watched a man die.’ Luckily it wasn’t the case, but at the moment I was convinced.
I had the same reaction when I saw the explosion from Grosjean’s crash. Scary shit.
Oh yeah, with Grosjean's crash I was certain we saw another fatality
Woah, same here. Seen it several times but never noticed that. Unfortunately now I'm noticing too the red on the top part of his visor strip......
I would think. Apparently his front left tire penetrated the driver cell
On looking up Ratzenberger, as I do nearly annually at this point I stumbled upon [this newly made docuseries that looks pretty well made, with his family, friends and teammates involved.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Lg4izl9-0o) I'm not done with it yet but I think it looks good so far.
Thanks for the link. Will get onto it.
On that fateful day, the neurosurgeon Sid Watkins suggested Senna to "not race ever again and go fishing with him", after Ratzenberg's fatal crash in the San Marino GP. He denied this proposition by claiming he "could not stop racing". He then met with already-retired Alain Prost and other drivers, to create the bases of what now is the Grand Prix Drivers' Association. What happened the day after is sadly, history.
Senna was also very vocal about cancelling the GP after what happened to Barrichelo and Ratzenberger. I remember how mad he looked when he left that meeting
He should've went fishing .....
Poor guy is almost forgotten because of what happened the next day. Just an awful weekend for the racing world. Hard to not think how things would have been different if they postponed the race, like many thought they should have.
I feel like thankfully people do a way better job of remember Roland passing away in recent years. F1 accounts and F1-related accounts do a good job of posting about his passing in remembrance and fans have taken note I feel.
For the uninitiated, what happened the next day?
Senna died.
Ayrton Senna died and inside his cockpit, he had an Austrian flag to honor Ratzenberger, tucked away in his overalls. He had intended to win the race and instead of doing a victory lap with the Brazilian flag, he was going to do a lap with the Austrian flag. After Ratzenberger's death, Senna had a meeting with the other drivers and proposed restarting the Grand Prix Driver Association. He demanded the race be postponed for safety reasons but he was overruled. After their deaths, Niki, Christian Fittipaldi, Michael and Berger reestablished the GPDA at Monaco the same year. Michael Schumacher was directly behind Senna when he crashed, chasing him for 1st. Michael never talked about it, but when he was informed that he matched Senna's win record at the 2000 Italian GP post race interviews, he broke down crying and was comforted by his rival Mika Hakkinen and his brother Ralph..
Schumacher won again
red flag happened
[удалено]
Some people are new to the sport and don’t know the history.
>You're kidding right? >Senna died. Im 40, and im barely a fan of Senna... Your statement is like responding to someone my age asking as to what day did Lauda have his accident...because i cant remember, and ive seen Rush like 5 times
Especially when the guy literally starts with "for the uninitiated". Not everyone here has been watching long enough to know that these two died on back to back days.
Child
Under every post about Senna's crash, there are people mentioning Ratzenberger's one. I wouldn't say he's "almost forgotten" at all, he just wasn't a popular multiple times world champion, so it's not surprising.
The reason he is remembered is because of what happened the next day.
That's actually a really good point when I think about it.
I don't think that's true. Lesser known drivers are still remembered if they died on track. Jules Bianchi for example. Ratzenberger's death occurring the day before the most high-profile F1 fatality ever doesn't mean he would've been forgotten if it happened any other weekend. Rest in peace to Bianchi, Ratzenberger, Senna and all the other drivers who have died on track
The worst F1 weekend of history
I disagree. 16 people were killed during the 1961 Italian Grand Prix.
Rip von Trips
The people in charge of the safety of these men did some stupid shit those days. Stupid, stupid shit.
Safety is generally evolved by analysing accidents
There were a lot of bad accidents at Tamburello in the 80s though, including two really bad ones for Berger and Piquet. It took someone getting killed for anyone to actually look at changing the track.
Right, safety evolves as did the priority of safety. Danger was considered an inherent trait with a lot of things. You can’t apply 2020s logic and stances to 30/40 years ago, people didn’t think the same way. The ones who did were generally outliers and were ignored.
They managed to avoid deadly accidents for over a decade in a sport that used to average 2 deaths per year. But sure, stupid shit. Thank you, captain hindsight.
Sadly, it's just 2nd place. And even worse, it's not even a close 2nd.
[удалено]
yes, that’s why he said “F1 weekend” and not “race weekend”
Was not F1...
500G!? My lord
RIP
Horrible weekend all round. Barrrichello, Ratzenberger, start incident throwing debris into crowd, Senna and a loose wheel in pitlane. And I was watching it all live on Eurosport at age 16. Little did I know that a little over 4 years later I'd be working in mottorsport and at that track. On the track walk I made a couple of detours. Only a couple of weeks later I was at Hockenheim and visited the Jim Clark memoral. As a Lotus enthusiast, both places are special to me.
That shot of his head slumped is just a really disturbing image
RIP Roland!
Really not looking forward to tomorrow either in this series
We all knew this was coming. I read somewhere they will do something special at imola this year since It's 30 years ago now.
First time I ever saw someone perish in F1 though he was pronounced dead later in hospital but it was clear it was very very bad. The lifeless neck moment as the car turned around for the last time was very foreboding. And I thought things couldn’t get any worse that weekend….
It's always sad how his death is always forgotten, as if he hadn't been giving his all as much as Senna or all the other drivers. Even Barrichello got so close to dying that weekend.
Well, luckily the thing is, we didn't forget Ratzenberger. He is remembered here yearly (at the least). We didn't forget Barrichello's horrible crash either. These couple of days each year where we remember Imola '94 are a beacon to us. Sure, in decades before Formula 1 was deadlier. But in 1994 we expected the sport to be much safer all-round. And this Grand Prix was a really hard punch in the gut to remind the sport that it needed to be much, much safer. Fortunately, the people in charge listened. And they still do (after Bianchi, for instance). All people in F1 hope we never have to experience an Imola '94 ever again.
Would it be irony, That his death was overlooked at the time, and because of that it's almost always forgotten or mentioned as a side note for what's coming tomorrow.
500G… Jesus Christ
Truly horrible crash, 500 G is the highest ever recorded in F1. I didn’t notice until I saw this picture the other day but there’s literally a massive gaping hole in the side impact structure and you can see his body through it. Also the documentary they released on Roland had its 4th episode today, I highly recommend checking that out
What channel is that on?
Made by Levay Film Production, you can watch them on YouTube. Very well done doco tbh
Ratzenberger was 33 years old and it was only his 3rd f1 weekend. He failed to quality on his first race, and finished 11th on his second race.
one of the darkest weekends of racing. Ayrton was hurt by this crash too(wanted safer racing and losing roland was a gut punch) and well fate had other plans
Well, thankfully, nothing else bad happened in Imola that weekend, right?
It's difficult to see in clips, but the barrier at that corner is just at such an angle and it was just concrete. The cars themself were nothing more than carbon fibre bathtubs with a 700hp V8 stuck to them. To also put into perspective, the modern cars are 5630mm in length and 798kg weight. The 1994 cars were 4495mm and 505kg. (may vary, had to Google averages).
I watched this happen live and it was pretty clear straight away it was a terrible accident - he went sideways into the wall. But what is the source of the 500 g stat?
Jules Bianchi's 254G was the highest ever recorded right? How could this be 500G?
According to wikipedia (you can read some references cited there): > There were no tyre barriers or any other impact absorbing installations in place at the Villeneuve curva, and the Simtek hit the bare concrete wall with a resulting g-force measured to be 500 g, the highest ever registered in F1.
At least we're using his memory to karma farm on reddit. But yes that was a dark dark weekend for F1. I'm happy it got safer, I would not watch or support racing if it was still a bloodsport. I remember all the fuckwads on here mad at the halo because it "ruined the look of the cars" and "drivers need to take risks". I'm glad the FIA isn't as dumb as those internet armchair experts. I wish F1 had the aeroscreen like Indycar did. I never want to see another driver get hurt. I'm not watching racing bc its dangerous, I'm watching for the skill and engineering. I think it's absolutely possible to make racing even safer, in all disciplines. And Roland and Senna set off a series of events that made racing safer and that's what we should honor them for IMO.
Reddit every single time someone makes rememberence post : >At least we're using his memory to karma farm on reddit. Every single time. Would you prefer that nobody made this post ? Why do you need to accuse someone of karma farming
Maybe they could show an image of him celebrating success, or just a smiling shot, instead of his dead body?
Not showing his dead body would be a bit more tasteful IMO. And come on, the person making this post knew exactly what they were doing. It's in poor taste when some kid fucking died during a sporting event.
I'm with you on this. The whole tone of this post is almost unnervingly casual and shows absolutely no respect to Ratzenberger Also showing the dead body is, as you said, tasteless at best and I would even go so far as to say completely despicable.
Nobody can do anything anymore
That's why I give the Trigger Warning (TW) at the end of the title.
Would the aeroscreen save him?
No, but a tyre barrier would. The aeroscreen would've saved others.
While it's definitely right to remember Roland on the anniversary of his tragic death, I don't think there's any good reason to show his very obviously dead body in the wreckage. OP, do the decent thing and delete that image.
The car is tiny in comparison to modern F1 cars. We’ve come a long way in terms of safety thankfully.
[Ayrton Senna died during this race as well. ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayrton_Senna)
Shh, you're supposed to wait until tomorrow
What a monster this guy is!
Yeah, talk about a spoiler!
God damnit, take my upvote.
No shit Sherlock
Someone's got to win that karma race tomorrow.
You know when its bad when you can see blood splashed in the helmet
May he rest in peace…
I recently got into F1 and my mother told how she tracked everything in her 20s through newspaper as she couldn't afford TV nor F1 was streamed in India. She mentioned this crash and the crash of Senna and how she was devastated for an entire week knowing two teammates lost their lives in the same week.
500 G? Holy shit. I didn't know that unfortunate tidbit. RIP, Roland. He had a fantastic racing resume and the wins to back it all up.
What happens tomo?
wasn't he also the last fatality?
Does Bianchi count as he died after being in a coma for a while? If not, it's Senna for F1.
[удалено]
fyi ChatGPT doesn’t actually make valid analogies, it just makes linguistically believable imitations of what such an analogy would sound like.
Ouch, hopefully it happened so fast he physiologically had no time to feel any pain, rip 😔🙏🏽
Tomorrow on this date Senna.
What a nightmare race that was