Innovative, influential F1 race director who made it his mission to beef up safety

The death of the Brazilian champion Ayrton Senna at the San Marino Grand Prix in 1994 affected Charlie Whiting deeply. It came one day after the death of Roland Ratzenberger, the Austrian driver, and, as the technical delegate to Formula One’s governing body, Whiting felt it was down to him to make sure safety improved dramatically.

Although these were the first deaths in F1 for 12 years, Whiting, who has died aged 66, and his colleagues used them as the impetus to launch a comprehensive safety campaign involving strengthened helmet design, higher cockpit sides, raised roll bars and wheel tethers to stop tyres flying off in accidents.

It seemed to work. Since then there has been just one driver death in F1, that of the Frenchman Jules

Bianchi, who died from injuries sustained in the Japanese Grand Prix in 2014.

The death of Bianchi, which came after his car skidded off the track in heavy rain and hit a mobile crane lifting another car off the edge of the circuit, also left a deep impression on Whiting and led to him introducing another critical innovation, the virtual safety car. This enabled him to impose safety car rules digitally through alerts on drivers’ steering wheels before the car itself could join the track.

Known to everyone in the F1 paddock simply as ‘‘Charlie’’, the softly-spoken, calm, unassuming workaholic was at once the F1 race director – effectively its referee – safety delegate and permanent starter. He was, moreover, the pivot around which the sport revolved.

It was up to him to start each race, when the five lights over the grid turned to red, signalling the stampede of millions of pounds of racing machinery, driven by the multimillionaire superstars of the sport to the first corner. He was also in charge when it was time to make the fine judgment to call for a safety car after an accident and it was up to him to determine if a race should be suspended or abandoned.

Whiting was also the man the teams went to for adjudication on design and rules issues with their cars and he signed off on new circuits being added to the F1 calendar.

Whiting had an ability to operate in the heart of a sport known for its egomaniacs, its conspiracies and its disputes over cheating, unfair treatment or skulduggery.

For many years he ploughed a steady furrow between two imposing figures in Bernie Ecclestone, the sport’s unpredictable and powerful commercial rights holder, and Max Mosley, its aggressive rules chief. He also negotiated his way with team owners who could be notoriously difficult to deal with and drivers, some of whom were worse in this respect than their bosses.

He had a formal education in mechanical engineering and was able to hold his own when refereeing a paddock full of engineers with world-class intellects. Their job was to try to find a way round the rules, Whiting’s was to ensure they did not.

He had started his career in F1 working as a mechanic for Ecclestone’s Brabham team. By 1981 he had become chief mechanic, in which role he oversaw Nelson Piquet’s world championship victories that year and in 1983. At that stage Whiting was, as one observer put it, a ‘‘black belt’’ in finding ways round the rules then in force, something that made him one of the best examples of a poacher-turned-gamekeeper in the sport’s history when he joined the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA).

In later life he could be droll on the subject, recalling how in 1981 Piquet’s Brabham took pole position at Monaco, only for the mechanics to fit a much heavier rear wing to ensure it was over the minimum weight limit afterwards. When the title-winning Brabham was brought out of retirement recently by its former driver for a few demonstration laps at the Brazilian Grand Prix, the F1 writer Andrew Benson turned to Whiting and teased: ‘‘I’ve just seen that illegal 1981 Brabham that took pole at Monaco.’’ Whiting gave him a mischievous smile and said: ‘‘No, you haven’t. You’ve just seen the perfectly legal one that ran later on.’’

Charles Whiting was born in 1952 in Sevenoaks, Kent. His parents had a farm close to the motor racing circuit at Brands Hatch and he and elder brother Nick used to sneak under the fence to watch the racing there as boys. The first grand prix he saw was in 1964 when he was 12.

After school during a happy childhood, Whiting used to work for Nick helping build his racing cars for autocross and circuit racing in the late 1970s. It was from this early introduction that he set his sights on being a mechanic, much to his mother’s horror.

His first full-time job in F1 was as a mechanic with the Hesketh team with the drivers Eddie Cheever and Derek Daly. When that team folded in 1978, Whiting made a move that would shape the remainder of his career, joining Ecclestone’s Brabham team.

Then came the death of the Brabham driver Elio de Angelis in a crash during testing in 1986. ‘‘That was tragic in that he wasn’t injured,’’ Whiting recalled. ‘‘There were only about four gallons of petrol in the car but unfortunately he tipped over, the petrol came out, it caught fire and there was no one there to put it out.’’

The team was sold the next year and Ecclestone, who was then running the sport fulltime, persuaded Whiting to join the FIA technical team in 1988.

His role for the FIA gradually expanded and by 1996 he had taken over the race starter position and was soon promoted to race director.

In 2018 Whiting played a key role in the introduction of the halo – a curved bar across the top of the cockpit that protects drivers from airborne cars and debris during accidents and in the case of cars rolling and which some purists find unacceptable. In the Belgian Grand Prix last year he was vindicated when it saved Charles Leclerc’s life after Fernando Alonso’s car landed on top of his.

His private life was full of drama too. In 1990 his brother, who had fallen into gangland circles, was brutally murdered. Gang members suspected him of being an informant over the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery, when £26 million was stolen from a warehouse at Heathrow airport. ‘‘Life was quite difficult for a while but we had to get on with it,’’ recalled Whiting.

Whiting became a millionaire several times over and was a relentless traveller in pursuit of his professional responsibilities but played golf and was a dedicated oenophile.

His first marriage, which ended in divorce, produced a daughter, who survives him. He is also survived by second wife Juliette and their two young children.

Whiting died in Melbourne of a pulmonary embolism while going through his usual routine preparing for the 2019 season-opening Australian Grand Prix. – The Times

The softly-spoken, calm, unassuming workaholic was ... the pivot around which the sport revolved.