Four Fatalities In Three Weeks: What Is Motorsport Doing Wrong?

Le Mans 2013 will long be remembered for the third lap death of Dane Allan Simonsen after a high-speed crash in his Aston Martin V8 Vantage GTE. On the very same afternoon of 22 June, German driver Wolf Silvester died while competing in the VLN Championship at the Nurburgring. And while NASCAR reels from the death of Jason Leffler on 12 June, F1 still has questions to answer regarding how a volunteer track marshal lost his life at the Canadian Grand Prix three days earlier.

Four deaths, all very different in their circumstances and yet all occurring in motorsport within a matter of weeks of each other. June 2013 has been a dark month for racing, but why? Are there genuinely preventable errors being made, or can you never really make high-speed driving a safe exercise?

Wolf Silvester

First off, we should acknowledge that Silvester’s death wasn’t due to a crash – it’s reported the two-time VLN champion succumbed to a heart attack while racing at the Nurburgring on Saturday. He was 55 years old. It may raise questions over the stresses placed on drivers’ bodies while racing, but it could of course be a total coincidence. Speculation isn’t appropriate here, so we won’t entertain it. All we know for sure so soon after the event is that Silvester’s death is a shock – he didn’t have a reported heart condition, and any such health problems would prohibit him from FIA competition.

No less shocking, of course, but more harrowing for the violence with which they occurred, are the losses of Allan Simonsen, and Jason Leffler, both 37. Leffler’s death has been judged to have been caused by blunt neck trauma caused by a 135mph impact with the Bridgeport New Jersey Speedway’s concrete retaining wall. Leffler’s neck actually impacted a foreign object, as opposed to being subjected to a fatal amount of G-force. Did the car’s window netting or roll cage fail, killing the occupant it was designed to protect? Are outdated circuits with no-leeway concrete boundaries still appropriate? Incidentally, it was a suspension failure and resultant steering rack lock-up that caused Leffler’s accident. Even so, we’d expect a modern sprint car to protect its driver at 135mph, surely? Or have we become complacent?

Jason Leffler

Ask many a racing fan (including myself) and it’s a common view we have indeed become complacent with racing safety. There have been near-fatal F1 moments for Kubica, Massa and Alonso in recent years, but no driver has died in F1 since 1994 (when, incidentally, we also lost two drivers in quick succession). We naturally expect drivers to walk away from huge smashes, like McNish at Le Mans in 2011 – how debris from his decimated Audi R18 didn’t murder the crowd of spectators beyond the tyre-wall I’ll never know.

It’s as much of a shock that the recent fatal accidents in motorsport have come from seemingly innocuous incidents. Simonsen appeared to lose control of his Aston GTE at Tetre Rouge after becoming distracted by a spinning Ferrari on the Mulsanne straight ahead, and drifting onto the slippery painted surface. The Vantage, according to reports, hit a piece of Armco mounted hard-up against a track-side tree, meaning it had no crumple room to absorb energy. If you watch the footage of the crash, the damage to the Aston’s bodyshell is appalling. The entire shell is twisted – this is a modern racing car, heavily overhauled for the 2011 season to be stronger and easier to maintain. Could any car have saved its driver after such a monstrous impact? Was the car itself at fault, or is it the race organiser’s fault for creating a potential accident blackspot manned with an unsuitable barrier? I’m not trying to launch a blame game here, but it must be said that Simonsen’s death is impossibly tragic because, perhaps naively, we expect the driver to walk away from the crash every single time. Just like you expect to survive a crash thanks to your airbags, traction control, and ABS, right?

Allan Simonsen

Huge respect at this time must go to Simonsen’s family, who insisted Aston Martin continued racing in Allan’s memory. Also to the team for racing so hard and almost nicking the class win, and finally to Aston Martin for their classy, poignant online tribute that you can find here.

As ever, these mercifully rare but always catastrophic events pose more questions in their immediate aftermath than answers, and Canada 2013 follows suit. Why was the stricken Sauber lifted so high by the crane driver that it obscured his view around the cab, and needed steadying by a marshall on foot? Why was the crane going so fast that the marshall was jogging alongside it, rather than walking? These guys are almost always volunteers, albeit highly trained to deal with emergency. The gentleman who lost his life just after the Canadian Grand Prix was let down badly – if what the FIA is telling us is indeed the truth and the whole truth.

Let’s end this on a positive note, because these tragedies do indeed bring out the best in people. Take the death of Dan Wheldon in 2011 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. In the wake of the former Indy 500 winner’s death, the cars were redesigned with faired-in rear wheels and new bodywork to reduce the risk of these open-wheeled racers getting locked together and firing each other skywards and out of control, as was the case in Wheldon’s last race. Therefore not only is the man himself remembered as a credit to the sport, but his legacy makes it a safer series for all his would-be future colleagues. The Dallara chassis is even designated ‘DW’ in his memory.

Doubtless we’ll hear of advancements at Le Mans and in trackside marshaling in the wake of 2013’s motorsport tragedy – here’s hoping we don’t have to suffer another in F1, WRC or any other discipline before improvements can filter in there too. RIP.