BBC 4 - Grand Prix: The Killer Years

Brilliant. Thanks for the heads up.

Hi Morghini

It is available to watch on iPlayer on the BBC site until sunday night at 9.59PM. Click here to watch it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00z8v18/Grand_Prix_The_Killer_Years/#recommendSource=tv_episode_page

Hi all

Did anyone record this programme & the one that was on before it on BBC4.

I missed them both and am very annoyed to have done so.

If anyone has a copy they could share on DVD then would be very grateful.

All the best

Owen

No, Vimious i've never driven an F1 car, but,at what point when driving our high powered cars on the public road do we become scared?, if you don't then you shouldn't be out there, most of your piece i found interesting,but the only people who could drive that fast were the well off, the other 5% of the populous couldn't, i'm sorry but it was still all Knights and chivalry, do it knowing there was a good chance you'd kill yourself wasn't brave in today's sense of the term, today's F1 driver's almost talk of big crashes as par for the course because there survival chances have gone up, i'm sorry real heroes in my book are the ones who know when to quit usually at the top of there profession.

I know what you mean. The programme seemed to be claiming the Roger Williamson crash was some kind of watershed after which tragedies were unheard of. Unfortunately we still had the horrific deaths of Francoise Cevert and Helmuth Koinigg as well as Mark Donohue and Peter Revson before the death-free 1976 season.

The deaths continued after that as well although this was against the backdrop of improved medical care and marshalling but the safety of the vehicles themselves was still low considering the performance they offered.

We all die, there is no getting away from the grim reaper. Over 2000 people die in the UK every average day, very few of them in a car crash.

Yes it was indeed shocking, though the programme was at times rather economical with the truth, several things were presented unquestioned as fact, when they are debatable at best if not out and out untrue, the Jochen Rindt Monza crash I mentioned earlier was just one example. I've met Jackie Stewart on several occasions, he's a genuinely nice bloke, I liked him a lot, but he's trotted out this "Two out of three drivers died in my time" quote a few times. It makes a good headline, but it simply isn't true, a few moments thought will show that it couldn't possibly be so. JYS raced in F1 for 8 years. By my quick reckoning, he raced against 72 drivers in that time, I may have missed one or two, but that's the approximate figure. In that time, 17 of those drivers died, though not all at the wheel of an F1 car, and that's rather less than 25%, not even one in four. Those are terrible figures, no getting away from that, it was good to see Sir Jackie so clearly wound up about this, the man really cared and with a few others he did a great deal of good. He should have been challenged on those figures though, as what he said simply is not so. It's been well publicised that he's dyslexic, but I don't think he's dis-numerate as well, I can't believe that he really thinks those statistics are accurate.

Peter your absolutely right.

However everything's relative and from where we sit, in a week where the European Parliment states it wants road-deaths to have ceased by 2050, the extremely graphic footage clearly illustrates the innocence of an era.

We're talking about an era were drivers and spectators alike were still heavily influenced by the previous war. They were used to death and the a couple of people dying doing what they really wanted to do every weekend I assume seemed quite reasonable - at first.

But then when there's no threat of imminent death to everyone people begin to reevaluate what is reasonable in sport.

I'll make a wild guess you've never had the ability or opportunity to drive an F1 car to its limit? How can we possibly judge people who have the gift and opportunity?

Any naturally talented person who is given the chance to do what they love at the highest possible level, competing against the very best the world has to offer would struggle to walk away. In fact you'd try your best to ensure you can keep doing it for as long as possible - hence safety finally exploded onto the agenda in motor racing.

The programme really illustrates how innocent and blinkered the drivers and their sport were. They didn't appear to realise or acknowledge it was possible to be safer and still compete at the highest level.

The driver stuck in the car at Monaco was Lorenzo Bandini. As you rightly say, most attempts at fire extinguishing and/or rescue during that period were usually in vain and presents a desparately uncaring attitude from the GP organisers of the time. During the Monaco fire the marshalls were lifting the fire hoses away from the fire every time a car came past!

The Roger Williamson incident is well documented in the book 'The Lost Generation', which I can recommend highly. Nothing like as graphic as this BBC4 programme but goes into great detail about Roger's crash, David Purley's heroic attempts to save him and the racing scene at the time.

There is so much misinformation going around about this, we all have great sympathy for Jochen Rindt's widow, but much of what she said is just plain wrong. It was Jochen's idea to drive the car without wings not Colin Chapman's, and many other drivers including I'm pretty sure Jackie Stewart tried the same thing that day, but to make things worse, Jochen wanted to try mixed tyre compounds. There's only one real eye-witness to the actual crash, Denny Hulme who was driving behind, he told the inquest that Rindt's Lotus became unstable under braking, almost certainly due to his mis-matched tyres, and speared into the barrier. Jochen refused to wear the crotch straps of his harness, so went forward and almost under the steering wheel on impact, and this is what killed him, his jugular was severed, that and a dangerous and incompetently installed Armco barrier that allowed his car to go underneath it, hence the subsequent Italian legal cover-up. A broken drive shaft was blamed at the time, but this was later proven not to be the case, though the story seems to have become 'fact' over time. Lotus didn't change their front shaft specs after Rindt's crash, and they never had another one break, Chapman told the inquest it broke on impact, but they preferred their version. I worked at Lotus under Colin Chapman, sure he had many faults, but his talents far outweighed them. I'd much sooner have placed my trust in him than any of the sanctimonious know-alls who have the nerve to criticise a man whose shoes they aren't fit to lick.