SOCHI, Russia — For many present, it was one of the most unsettling moments in the modern era of Formula One: a room packed with TV crews and hundreds of reporters at the control center for the inaugural Russian Grand Prix, pin-drop silent as monitors played and replayed silent trackside videos of the accident at last weekend’s race in Japan that may have ended a 20-year span during which no driver has been killed or suffered permanently disabling injuries.
The occasion was a first public accounting by officials of the governing body of world motor sports, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, known as the F.I.A., for the events that led to the crash in Japan, and the severe brain injuries suffered by the driver involved, the 25-year-old Frenchman Jules Bianchi.
At the session on Friday, the federation officials, not renowned for their transparency in times of crisis, offered a rare — and for the officials involved, painful — chronicle of the decisions, or lack of them, that appear to have contributed to the episode. The accident has shaken Formula One like no other event since the death of the Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna in a 190-mile-an-hour crash at Imola, Italy, in 1994.
The briefing here came five days and 5,000 miles away from the Suzuka track in Japan, and focused on the last laps of the Japanese Grand Prix as they unfolded, shortly before 5 p.m. local time, in torrential rain and fast-fading daylight.
The videos showed the red-white-and-black-striped car No. 17 driven by Bianchi running wide on a fast left-hand sweep, aquaplaning on a pool of standing water and shooting like an arrow across 150 yards of gravel into the multiton counterweight at the rear of a hoisting tractor that was clearing another wrecked car from the crash barriers.
Continue reading the main storyUnofficial estimates by Formula One experts have put the force exerted on Bianchi’s car as it came to a halt, its top sheared off by the underside of the tractor’s counterweight, at more than 200 Gs, far beyond what has generally been considered survivable by those who research air crashes and other high-velocity accidents.
Bianchi, unconscious and with his helmet shattered, was pulled from the wreckage and transferred to an ambulance for the 32-minute, 9-mile drive to the Mie General Hospital. A week later, he remains there, with injuries that neurological experts not directly involved in his care say often end in a decision to switch off life support systems.
Bianchi’s doctors have said that he experienced a diffuse axonal injury, a term that describes the rupturing of axons, nerve fibers that connect brain cells. The axons tear when the head decelerates rapidly in a collision, forcing the brain against the frontal lobe.
Bianchi has his parents and other relatives from his hometown, Nice, at his bedside in Japan.
The crash has been a blow to Formula One, casting a pall of dismay across the traveling circus of drivers, engineers, team bosses, commercial sponsors and others who commute across continents to the 19 races that currently make up the schedule for the world drivers’ championship. After the Russian race on Sunday, the next stop is Austin, Tex., for the United States Grand Prix on Nov. 2.
Part of the shock has been that the structural improvements made in the design of Grand Prix cars since Senna’s death, coupled with advances in helmet design and other aspects of drivers’ personal equipment, have fostered a sense that Grand Prix racing is no longer the death-in-the-afternoon sport it was in the first decades after the Formula One championship was established in 1950.
Federation officials have said that other major sports — equestrianism and mountaineering among them — have safety records that are far worse. But some of the alarm over Bianchi’s crash may be because video replays, quickly reaching new audiences through YouTube and other Internet channels, have lent greater urgency to all serious racing accidents.
To an outsider, the F.I.A. briefing here seemed redolent of the halting fashion in which other organizations – NASA, after the two Shuttle disasters, for example — have begun their efforts to come to terms with accidents that had roots, as seems to have been the case for Bianchi, in systemic failures. Also at play were what Charlie Whiting, the Englishman who acts as director for all Grand Prix races, described as a mixture of chance factors that he called “a perfect storm.”
Among these, Whiting listed the appalling weather and a strong element of misfortune in Bianchi’s having left the track on a path that carried him straight to the site of the recovery operation that was centered on the wrecked car of the German driver Adrian Sutil. And, though Whiting only implied it, another factor may have been that Bianchi had been driving too fast, on part of the track where marshals were waving yellow caution flags, as the end of the race neared and the chances of improving his tail-end finishing position diminished.
Although Whiting declined to say what F.I.A. officials had learned of Bianchi’s speed from studying the videos and car-to-pit telemetry, broadcasters who have examined the footage say that Bianchi was traveling at about 110 m.p.h. when he hit the tractor.
Whiting, 62, fielded a barrage of reporters’ questions about the federation's decision not to advance the race’s 3 p.m. start time to avoid the worst of the coming weather. He said that he had urged such a step, only to be overruled by more senior Formula One officials reluctant to disrupt worldwide TV schedules that carry coverage to audiences that number in the hundreds of millions.
He was also questioned about his decision not to red-flag the race before the crash, when teams complained about the visibility and track conditions.
He said that from experience, he did not believe that the racing conditions had become unmanageable. And, he added, reports claiming that one driver, Felipe Massa of Brazil, was “screaming” on his car-to-pit radio for the race to be stopped were an exaggeration. “What he said was that track conditions were getting worse,” he said.
Most insistently, Whiting was asked why he had not ordered a safety car onto the track to slow the field when the tractor was deployed to recover Sutil’s car after he crashed at Suzuka’s Dunlop curve. To this, Whiting said that tractors had been used to recover wrecked cars for 20 years, and that it had never been standard practice to deploy a safety car when the wreckage being cleared was well off the track, as at Suzuka. “We were not deviating in any way from what we’ve done before,” he said.
Other issues he covered included whether the impact in Bianchi’s case would have been mitigated if the F.I.A. had decided after a review five years ago to mandate that Formula One cars be built with fighter-jetlike cockpit canopies combined with uncrushable rollover bars over the drivers’ heads.
After exhaustive studies, Whiting replied, Formula One’s safety experts decided that the technical problems in devising systems that would work in high-impact crashes were too great. As an example, he said that cockpit canopies would require a rollover bar that would extend at least 20 centimeters – nearly eight inches — above the driver’s head. Even that would not have saved Bianchi, who had undergone an impact force “way in excess” of anything that a canopy and a rollover bar could have absorbed, he said.
“It’s impossible to cater for an accident like this,” he said.
F.I.A. medical staff members at the news conference were asked why Bianchi was taken to hospital by ambulance, rather than by the medical helicopter that is routinely on standby at Formula One races. Japanese officials, they said, had informed the F.I.A. that the available helicopter would not be able to land at the Mie hospital because of the worsening weather there.
Whiting also said that none of the potential changes in race procedures that the federation's Sporting Commission might order after reviewing the Bianchi crash could be instituted before the race here.
He said these steps might include rules imposing tight limits on the speeds through yellow-flag zones – a step known in Formula One as “virtual safety car conditions.”
At Sochi, where the fastest cars have been exceeding 200 miles an hour on the new, in places unusually narrow, 3.6-mile track that runs through the Olympic Park built for the Winter Games this year, heavy tractors will again be used to recover crashed vehicles, he said. However, he added, drivers would be told to proceed with “extreme caution” through any stretches where yellow flags are waved.
Over all, Whiting suggested that nothing the F.I.A. or the race management could have done would have saved Bianchi.
“Nothing could have been done better,” he said, outlining what he said were the textbook actions that were taken after the crash to get Bianchi from the wreck, and to red-flag the race on the next lap. He added, “We know exactly what to do in the event of an accident.”
“Saying that,” he added, “we have to learn from what happened, and we will learn.”
Continue reading the main story