Truthfully, I see no reason why you might as well not change that particularly barrier to one where anyone going off has a shallower angle to hit at - the problem is the idea that tracks need to be changed after every accident. I can't speak for anyone else, but as a fan and an outside observer, it hardly ruins the spectacle to have the barrier at the chicane be unsafe.
The problem is never the single action of making a part of the track safer, but the snowball effect. Where does it stop? However noble trying to make racing safer is, there is no line in the sand, no point we can all comfortably agree 'it's safe enough'. Some of us reckon it's safe enough as it is right now, and some of us think we're still decades away.
Personally, I have a hard time supporting the breed of race fans that think tracks need to be changed after every even remotely serious accident - it's racing. It will never be totally safe, and in some sense, never should be. I don't want to see a driver hurt, but I also don't want to see chicanes - the cancer of the racing world - hanging off of every track in the world today like tumors every time a driver (who doesn't have to be a racing driver) has an accident there. I sometimes wonder if the average racing fan really has a grasp of the danger. Accidents happen, and tracks are only as dangerous as the drivers make them. It's racing. We'll see seemingly minor accidents be serious or fatal, and we'll see drivers walk away from apparently awful crashes. F1 is a series like any other - sooner or later, we'll see another driver die. That may not happen for twenty years, or it may happen an hour from now. For a while yesterday, many of us thought Sergio Perez was the latest name to be added to the list. It is what it is. No driver to be seriously injured or die in an accident could ever be said to have got what he deserved, but there is a point - and all drivers at a professional level are past it - where they can have no complaints. It's a dangerous sport, and there are plenty of safe ones to play.
I've got no problems with changes to tracks in and of themselves, I just wonder where the people pushing for these changes expect it to end, and when - if ever - do we draw a line under it all and say 'We've done what we can. There's risk in racing, the worst is always possible and that's just how it is'. Why fight battles that cannot be won? If there is no place where we can stand, plant the flag in the ground and say 'This is it, we're here', then what's the point? No one wants to see drivers hurt, but it happens, and it's hardly unfair that racing drivers need to pay the consequences for their actions like the rest of us.
But who really knows.
Edited by andrew., 29 May 2011 - 11:20.
).
