It’s like football in the Sixties…
GEORGE RUSSELL has called on Formula One to find a ‘solution’ to this year’s bouncing cars or risk subjecting drivers to dementia.
Speaking ahead of tomorrow’s Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona, Mercedes’ rising star was responding to cars hitting their suspension hard, causing drivers’ heads to judder up and down.
Although Mercedes are particularly prone to ‘porpoising’, as the phenomenon is known, even Ferrari are troubled by the problem despite Charles Leclerc leading Max Verstappen by 19 points at the top of the standings.
A 2019 survey claimed that professional footballers are three-and-a-half times more likely to die from dementia than the general population.
Russell said: ‘When you are travelling at 200mph on the straight, and you are smashing up and down on the ground, you wouldn’t choose to have it that way.
‘You could compare it to the footballers of the
Sixties, Seventies and Eighties when they had the massively heavy footballs.
‘Analysis has shown that there were health consequences for these chaps who headed the ball. Formula One is the centre of innovation and there is no reason why we cannot find a scientific solution for this.’