#like i totally understand athlete brain pushing yourself to the max

[gayferrari]

man. sid watkins and charlie whiting did So Much for formula one that now the entire system doesn’t work without them. ahhh but the good old bernie ecclestone era when the people in charge of looking after drivers health could just, you know, threaten or manipulate the owner of f1 into doing what they said! a system that also was functionally broken but hey, at least it was broken in a way that protected the drivers.

seriously though, it seems strange but the whole system of how to protect drivers etc actually did function when formula one was run in a more autocratic way (very few times i’ll ever say that) because it meant it was easier to hold management to account, and it meant there was a face for people to alternately rage against or praise, rather than a faceless corporate entity. do i think bernie ecclestone was a good guy in any way shape or form? no, his statements on women’s “place” in motorsports were enough for me to heavily dislike him, without going into the stuff i heard from one of my dad’s colleagues who was his PA for a while. however, the one good thing he brought to the table was his irreplaceability.

if mohammed ben sulyamen were to get caught up in some kind of scandal where it turned out he wasn’t protecting drivers properly, liberty media the corporation can easily say ‘sorry guys, our bad, we’ll replace him’ and put someone just as bad in the role. ecclestone, at the very least, was someone who tied his own image to the sport and who was for a time irreplaceable because he owned the circus. this may have pushed him to make some questionable decisions (ahem, crashgate being known about and covered up by ecclestone to preserve the integrity of the sport due to the scale of the scandal and the recent - 14 year old - deaths of senna and ratzenburger casting a pall over dangerous actions and the sport’s only-just-recovering reputation as a consequence of these deaths) but it also pushed him to listen to the experts, attempt to avoid life threatening and career threatening injuries that the management could prevent like the plague, and also use mass amounts of money to bribe the british government over tobacco advertising.

(not technically a good thing but the marlboro and lucky strike liveries were cunty as fuck. i don’t make the rules)

wild thing to think about, but i do see it as functionally true - the way medical officials especially were able to control ecclestone and his rules meant drivers were able to rely on them to protect them, without running any risk of having to take more drastic action and potentially lose their seat etc. i haven’t properly looked into this yet, although i’m sure someone has, but i’d be very interested in finding out about the rate of injuries reported to the fom/fia before races which prevented drivers from racing, and whether that has gone up or down in succeeding years. certainly going back to montreal 2011 (it’s just stuck in my head at the moment) perez did not compete due to a concussion suffered at the proceeding race, allowing pedro de la rosa to take his seat for the race, despite passing the fia’s medical exam.

we can quibble about what this says about perez (that head injuries are fucky and he was completely sensible to not race, in my opinion) but what it ways about the whole fia/fom at that time is that safety of drivers ruled - mclaren, a team that has never been incredible on the whole looking after their drivers situation, didn’t threaten his seat, allowed him to step out knowing his own limits, and were not pushed to make him race. perez, at that time and because of the way drivers were protected by the system, was able to take agency over himself and pull himself out knowing his own limits. compare this to the current meme that ‘you have to hurt yourself to win a race this year’ and lets look at the impact of the injuries so far sustained by out race winners:

carlos sainz, recovering from appendicitis (which is not something to joke about! one of my best friends had it when we were younger and she spent six months or so in and out of the hospital due to complications. when i tell you i was Horrified at him turning up the next day to the paddock and participating in melbourne). appendicitis primarily affects the lower regions of the stomach area, and can manifest as simply a sore stomach, depending on severity. the surgery (tw, but i’m not being that gory/explicit) involves an incision to the lower stomach area and the removal of the appendix. this operation typically takes at least TWO WEEKS to recover from to go back to NORMAL ACTIVITIES. sure athletes tend to recover more quickly than those not at the peak of their physical fitness, but carlos went on to race round a track which takes speed of up to 235kph, and experiencing between 2-6+gs. if his stitches didn’t fucking split after that race they must have been made of fucking titanium, it was insanely fucking dangerous for him to have races and yet all i saw was praise??

lando norris’s cut nose in miami and tonsillitis in monaco are less concerning than carlos’s appendicitis, although i would expect the g-forces and strain on his nose he probably faced makes it likely he’ll have some kind of indent there at least semi-permanently, and depending on the strength of his tonsillitis whilst probably contagious, racing with possible coughing fits and just generally feeling bad likely made little affect on his race, given how slow monaco was this year, but to his credit that he had the concentration to not actually fall asleep from fatigue and end up in the wall is commendable.

charles, george and lewis, our next set of winners, as far as i know did not race on injuries, although i know lewis definitely has before, and while i can’t remember charles doing so, i wouldn’t put it past him. he’s also either raced or qualified after his seatbelts coming off, which, uh.

oscar piastri, we now know, broke his rib around silverstone, and therefore was still recovering from this in the succeeding races. not only is it likely that his ribs would have been hugely taped up to prevent movement in the car (and he may have been asked to be slightly lighter to counteract the weight of any bandages) which would make it significantly more difficult for him to breathe during the race - we’ve all heard that one clip of charles accidentally leaving his radio open during barcelona-catalunya and how hard he was breathing racing carlos. imagine that but with about three quarters to half the breath intake - but the elevation changes (especially in spa-francorchamps), g-forces and acceleration speeds must have kept in feeling like someone was stabbing him every race, throughout the race.

this isn’t like charles racing last year with an apparently pretty awful toothache (knew he’d done it sometime), the conditions in which carlos and oscar raced are genuinely dangerous. carlos could have torn his stitches and been in and out of hospital for months, even longer if any infection got into the wound or it developed even towards sepsis etc, ruining both this season for him, but also possibly his career. oscar, if he’d gotten into a crash, could have ended up piercing a lung, which i feel doesn’t need more explanation as to how dangerous that was. sure, both of them were ultimately fine as far as we know, and i’m definitely pointing out worst-case scenarios, but the issue is that carlos would have gotten into that car if he had been allowed and i doubt how much ferrari or the fom, aside from the cmo, would have protested. oscar did get back into the car. sure formula one comes with risks, but it feels like we are forgetting what we’ve learnt in the past - it feels like we’re heading towards a time safety standards are so lax, cmos and drivers and even teams are so paralysed with lack of agency that we end up in another worst case scenario.

(love ur blog, sorry for the bleakness <3)

pls don't apologise these long ass essays are keeping me feed and I'm delighted you decided to send them to me. however: please go into the gossip you heard from Bernie's ex-PA, unless the're too nasty / offputting to share

(My 2 cents here are: I dislike Bernie but I dislike MBS more. you make a good point about hierarchical F1 being somewhat better than corporate F1 just because you have only a few guys to sway. Also: I think we don't know enough about Oscar's case bc broken ribs can be relatively "minor" to absolutely fucking not, especially if you're wearing a seatbelt. Ultimately I don't think we need to nitpick the specific injuries but the whole "would ANY injury be deemed 'too much' to race"? and I'm not sure teams / F1 care enough to draw the line. Nothing new to add etc.)

but please drop the goss if you're so inclined <3