Both would be missing the point by a landslide. There's no way you can make every angle of a heavy recovery truck safe to hit at 250 km/h. As for cockpit covers, what good would it have been when the impact was strong enough to rip apart the entire car's top half?KevC wrote:I hope it leads to come sort of cowling or cushioning on the recovery vehicles rather than re-opening the debate on cockpit covers or roll bars.
What needs to be debated is the fact that a recovery truck was operating on the track without a Safety Car, in the rather treacherous context of rapidly worsening wet conditions. I've watched F1 since the 90's, including the one race where this exact situation occured and nearly resulted in fatalities (Suzuka 1994 iirc), and complaints from commenters and (former) drivers regularly pointed out any occurences of a truck operating under racing conditions as a safety gamble. There was a point in the early 2000's where Brundle would complain about a truck on the track literally every other race. How could there be a situation like this in 2014? At Suzuka of all places?
IMO the person who allowed the recovery of Sutil's car without deploying the SC has a lot to answer for. The race director's job basically is to ensure he always gets criticized for being overly cautious, rather than ever risking a single tragedy.
I'm still curious about the timing of the incident. If there was at least one lap between the two crashes as I suspect, this really is inexcusable.
322 gps | 14 pp | 11 1st
