Perez crash puts drivers on edge
PRECISELY what will go through the minds of 20 drivers as they stand in silent tribute to a fallen brother is anybody’s guess. but after that solemn minute’s quiet on the grid before tomorrow’s Hungarian Grand Prix they will pull down their visors and set off to race each other at 210mph.
Everywhere here are reminders of Jules bianchi, the French driver who succumbed to a nine-month battle against the head injuries he received in Japan last october. ‘Ciao Jules’ and ‘ Race for Jules’ and numerous well-meant messages will be worn on cars, helmets, flags and hearts this weekend.
the rawness of the emotion that finally bit last Friday night when a 25-year-old life of unfulfilled talent ended, prompted more concern than usual in practice yesterday when Sergio Perez (below) ended upside down in his Force India after suspension failure caused him to slew off the track at 180mph.
the session was suspended. His mangled machine was taken away to the garage, where it and the car of his team-mate nico Hulkenburg remained for the rest of the day’s running while the f ault was examined.
but, most i mportantly, from the wreckage, stepped Perez. Paint had scraped off his car’s bodywork on to the track, but the driver was unscathed. Just as the l ucky chap always is.
or so we had become conditioned to think before bianchi, the popular Frenchman from the Marussia team, slipped out of consciousness at Suzuka. His death shocked Formula one’s young group of millionaires more than it could those of the Moss and Stewart eras.
We are 60 years on from motor racing’s worst tragedy when 83 spectators died at Le Mans and the race went on. As did grands prix that were darkened by the deaths of Luigi Musso, Peter Collins, Lorenzo bandini and tom Pryce, to name but a few.
Attitudes change and safety improves. So among the drivers who will bow their heads tomorrow will be 17-year- old Max Verstappen, who was still four years away from being born when the last Formula one driver to die from racing injuries, Ayrton Senna, perished in the San Marino Grand Prix.
Danger can never leave the track; it can only be relieved by reacting to the latest freak accident, however far apart from the last. So the risk unites all ages of drivers. As if to prove the point, niki Lauda, Lewis Hamilton’s chairman at Mercedes, wore the perils of motor sport on his face here yesterday. thirty nine years after being pulled out of his Ferrari with first-degree burns that required flesh to be taken off his thigh to rebuild his face, his charred ear was covered with a sticking plaster, a victim of sunburn.
Hamilton, fastest in both practice sessions yesterday and favourite to win tomorrow’s race, has never been afraid of danger. but he admitted bianchi’s death was a ‘reminder’ of what can lay in wait, saying: ‘I do dangerous things because they are exciting. It is not that you get in the car thinking you are going to lose your life; you are thinking about going to the edge of the envelope with the car.
‘People think that it isn’t really dangerous because there has been no death for 20 years. but we are driving bloody fast and once we are in the wall it hurts.
‘It is there in our minds always. We are fully accepting that we are getting in a car and there is danger. It is why we train the way we do. It is why we focus the way we do.’
Like a band of brothers, the drivers went up the road from nice’s baroque Sainte-Reparte Cathedral, where bianchi’s funeral service was held on tuesday, to a little pub. A breed together, a breed apart, they drank to his memory.
‘there are 20 of us in the world,’ said McLaren’s Jenson button. ‘We all go racing together. We might not be as friendly together as they were back in the Seventies, but we look out for each other, and we definitely don’t want anything happening to each other.
‘People say when you get older you’re more fearful. I don’t feel that when I’m driving a car. I do when I’m doing other things but in a racing car, it’s like walking in your front door.’
that tells why, after a pause on the grid tomorrow, the drivers will unlock arms and drive like hell.
LOTUS were half an hour late starting practice, having only finally paid the £350,000 they owed tyre suppliers Pirelli. the team, who have unpaid bills worth half a million pounds, are struggling for survival. Renault are potential buyers.