The Roar
The Roar

Advertisement

Massa's F1 crash to be investigated

Roar Pro
26th July, 2009
0

A full investigation into the causes and repercussions of Ferrari driver Felipe Massa’s dreadful freak accident during qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix was launched on Sunday.

The investigation will be conducted by the sport’s ruling body, the International Motoring Federation, with the Brawn GP team.

Massa suffered skull and eye injuries, as well as brain concussion, when he was struck on the head by a spring that broke loose from compatriot Rubens Barrichello’s Brawn GP car.

The debris hit Massa’s helmet just above his left eye at around 275 kph.

It knocked him unconscious and caused him to crash into a tyre barrier at Turn Four of the Hungaroring circuit.

Massa was reported to be stable in hospital on Sunday morning, his Ferrari team said, and he will have a further scan later in the day.

The accident came just six days after Briton Henry Surtees, 18, the son of former world champion John Surtees, was killed after being hit on the head by a wheel from another car that crashed during a Formula Two race at Brands Hatch in England.

Massa, one of the sport’s most popular drivers, was examined first at the circuit medical centre and then airlifted to the AEK Hospital in Budapest where they carried out surgery and put him into an induced coma.

Advertisement

Doctors at the hospital were said to be encouraged by his condition overnight, and reported that he had suffered no further complications.

Barrichello, a fellow-native of Sao Paulo and a close friend of Massa, visited Massa at the hospital on Saturday evening. Massa’s father, mother and pregnant wife were flying to Hungary from Brazil.

Barrichello’s car suffered a rear suspension failure in Turn Three. The spring came off the car and bounced on the track until Massa’s Ferrari collected it four seconds later.

Massa’s carbon-fibre helmet absorbed most of the energy from the spring and appeared to save his life.

The incident brought back memories of the fatal accident that claimed the life of Ayrton Senna during the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola in 1994 when a piece of debris penetrated his racing helmet.

Since then massive safety advances in Formula One have seen helmets improved – the latest generation are said to be twice as strong as their predecessors – and the sides of cockpits raised and strengthened.

The drivers now also wear head and neck restraint devices to protect them from high G-forces in major accidents.

Advertisement

Ross Brawn, boss of the Brawn team, said he would do all he could to find out exactly what had happened, but warned against knee-jerk reactions.

“We need to keep a perspective on it – from what’s been seen last weekend and this, we need to have a proper study to see if we need to do anything,” he said.

“You can have covers or canopies but you have to be able to get at the driver and extract him (from the car) if there is an accident. And you don’t want anything that collapses down on a driver.

“In the history of F1 it is a fairly rare occurrence, but we must take it seriously and see what we can do. We must make sure we don’t do something that makes the situation worse.”

McLaren boss Martin Whitmarsh said the Surtees and Massa crashes should act as a safety wake-up call similar to that which followed Imola in 1994 when Senna and Roland Ratzenberger were killed.

“Inevitably we all become complacent if we’re not confronted with a serious accident,” he said. “Obviously ’94 was a massive wake-up call for all of us in Formula One at the time.

“It led to everyone, the FIA, teams, contributing to a lot of big steps forward in safety and I think we have to go again. For everyone involved we’ve got to make sure we do everything we can.”

Advertisement

He added: “Motor racing is dangerous and racing drivers are incredibly brave – and that is something we should all remember. Every time a racing driver goes up the pit-lane we become a bit nonchalant about it.”

close