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MG Midget and Sprite General - Grand Prix - The killer years (NMC)

Hi all, for those with access to BBC iPlayer I would highly recommend watching Grand Prix: The killer years.

It covers the attitude towards health and safety in the 1960's and 70's and the lives that were lost. It has some astonishing achive footage and interviews with the World CHampions of that era.

Thanks
Mark
Mark Whitmore

I recorded it, and watched it again last night.
The footage of Roger Purley struggling in vain to put the fire out and right the crashed car in which Roger Williamson was trapped at the 1973 Dutch GP was harrowing. The fire extinguisher he was given seemed to have absolutely no effect on the fire at all. He got awarded the George medal for his efforts.
At the beginning of the program, they show what appeared to be the corpse of a driver slumped in the cockpit of a burnt-out racing car. The corpse is then shown being lifted out of the car - does anybody know who the driver was??
Adrian Jones

Correction: It was DAVID Purley, not Roger.
Adrian Jones

I'm not sure who the driver who you refer to was but it does show the same/similar footage later on and does mention a name. I will have to watch it again for that info.

I agree about the David Puley footage, you can feel the anguish and frustration. It bought a lump to my throat.

Mark
Mark Whitmore

It's on youtube :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hy7gmd8XXAA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBTMEyvhR_w&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxGaejdBb4M&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT8c5yfjR7w&feature=related
Adrian Jones

I haven't seen the programme, but the "corpse" may have been Lorenzo Bandini who actually died 3 days later after his 1967 Monaco crash.

Geoff E

I saw the program and the way the program had run did suggest that the corpse was actually Bandini?

Not sure that would have been the case. If I remember the MotorSport account of the time correctly Bandini had suffesred severe burns after the car had been righted. But the car had exploded after he had been rescued from the cockpit! Sadly no BBC sunday coverage at the time so we had to rely on reports in magazines!

Sadly for Lorenzo was that by the time he had managed to get a permanant drive in a championship Ferrari the Sharknose was passed its best and ferrari were entering a lean time! We will never know how good he could have been!

Stewart I think was particularly good on the program, the praise he gave Graham for helping save his life at Spa and then the best part for me was when he recounted the criticism he had received for wanting to improve driver "survivability"

Stewart suggested out of every 3 drivers competing 2 would crash and die! Many drivers claimed those like Stewart who insisted on better safety were chicken and had no balls for the sport.

Stewart reminded THEM amd the show that at the time he had plenty of bravery as he was winning races and championships. Great man!
Bob Turbo Midget England

Stewart's recollection of the percentage dying was at fault - it was actually nearer 25%.

http://forums.autosport.com/index.php?showtopic=144451&view=findpost&p=4929181
Geoff E

Yes probably right Geoff I think Stewart had wanted to say that 1 in 3 would die the 33% would possibly have been nearer the mark. That said a lot did die but I can name many who did not. Dan Gurney to name one.
Bob Turbo Midget England

Just watched it. Very sad to see so many dying in such horrible situations. What did strike me was the speed that the cars could travel at. Rindt doing 185mph when he crashed into the barrier. FI cars today don't do that much more.
Neil K

F1 cars aren't much faster today than then because today's cars use a huge amount of power to 'drive' the rear wing which provides downforce, which results in faster cornering and faster lap times.
Daniel Thirteen-Twelve

Yes - apparantly there's so much drag at top speed, that lifting off causes deceleration of 1G... that's before you apply the brakes; this is the same G as a modern car when the anchors are fully applied.

A
Anthony Cutler

As for the Bandini fatality, I've read that one factor was the press helicopter hovering over the crash site and fanning the flames...

-:G:-
Gryf Ketcherside

watching it at the moment. The 'corpse' was Lorenzo Bandini at Monaco.

Malcolm
M Le Chevalier

I haven't watched it yet but...I had gotten interested in F1 and here in the states the only real coverage you could get was on ABC's Wide World of Sports on Saturday afternoon. They were showing the Monaco GP and Bandini came through chicane and missed the exit, hitting the retaining barrier and catching fire. They showed the car burning over and over from every angle they had and the one thing that sticks in my mind after all of these years is how ghoulish the producers were repeating that horrific scene the way they did. Safety has come a long way since then. A prime example is Kubica's wreck in Canada a couple of years ago. He had bruises whereas in a car from the sixties they would have spent days separating the driver from the car. In spite of the accidents, I'm still a big fan of F1.
Martin Washington

....and of course Purley himself was very lucky to survive a massive smash a few years later only to give up racing and take up aerobatics which killed him in 1985 at the age of 40.
In those days they did all sadly live fast and die hard.
Matt1275 Bucks

At the end they close with 'it was 1976 before a season passed without a fatality' however, I thought it was in 76 that Lauda had a huge firey crash at the Nurburgring and famously lost his ears so 76 still wasn't what you would call an incident free season!

Malcolm
M Le Chevalier

But there still wasn't a fatality, it didn't say no-one was hurt!

I thought the whole programme was in particularly bad taste, just a procession of crashes paraded in front of us like a freak show.

If the crashes had been used to illustrate how car and circuit design have combined to prevent the same happening - perhaps with a treatise on fuel cells/flameproof clothing/deformable structures etc etc the documentary would have had some value. But this was the worst form of crash video, dwelling on drivers' suffering for our entertainment.

Shame on you BBC!
Max max-at-midgetmax-dot-com

I disagree Max, I think it said much more about the different attitude of the public - and race organisers at those times. I remember quite a few of those deaths as a racing enthusiast in the 1960s and 1970s. But I also remember just seeing them as a part of the process. And this attitude extended into rallying that I took part in as a competitor as well. There were fatalities in events that I took part in. Always a shock, but that was just the way it was.

But then I do also remember the changing attitudes as the Drivers association began to have an influence, and I thought that was explained quite well in the documentary. OK, they didn't go into the technicalities as you say, but then that wasn't what the programme was about. But it was about the public interest and the gradual changes that occurred in spectator's attitudes.

Either way, I found it a disturbing mix of watching some excellent footage of some great cars, whilst at the same time being reminded of all the equally great drivers who died in the name of "entertainment".

Guy
Guy

I would agree with you Guy, if it weren't for the fact that the film were ONLY about the accidents, dwelling just too long on the gory details.

Why did they need to show Bandini in the car? Everything lingered just too long.
Max max-at-midgetmax-dot-com

Max, I too agree - it didn't make for happy care-free watching. But I think the clue was in the title.
Guy

Max wrote "Why did they need to show Bandini in the car? Everything lingered just too long."

Probably produced by the same people who produced the original show that I saw (see my post above).

Actually, I think that many people have this macabre sense of reality and seem to enjoy the suffering of others. Maybe that's why NASCAR is so popular here with its multi-car crashes. I've never understood that approach to racing. To me it's about the skill required to make the car go fast but safely. Get to the end of the race in one piece.
Martin Washington

Sorry Max but on this occassion you are totally wrong.

The documentary was and needed to be shocking. It was all about the battle Stewart and the GPDA had with circuit owners and the like to make our sport safer and humanitized.

Do you think that in 1994 at San Marino that the crash of Senna should have gone un noticed and after the final rsults had been broadcast the announcer should have merely stated that Oh and Senna was killed, now follows "upstairs Downstairs"

If we do not have direct access to these images and feelings then we can never understand them. We needed to understand the carnage and the hopelessness of the case to really understand the enormity of the task achieved by Sir Jackie!

It is only when we see images of thousands of innocent people being slaughter in wars that we can ever understand why they are not as glamourous as many would have us believe.

The most vivid image I have of the atrosities of Vietnam was the poor children running naked from the napalm bombs dropped on their village.

Do we understand the crimes against the jews until we see and feel the emotions of the gas chambers at the various death camps.

We can not live in a sanitized world where we believe everything is wonderful. TV has to demonstrate to us the truth of the world and situations. I think we are blessed to have this media and we should welcome any emotions that it portrays.

I always think of the Black Adder series "Black Adder goes forth" For was it 13 episodes we laughed at the antics of the guys in the trenches then on the final episode we saw the reality of death in the millions do we not want to know that? Do we want to think it was all a joke? If you dont want reality Max then go live in the USA!

Robert (Bob) Midget Turbo

What they didn't say was the number of Drivers killed in testing or injuries other team member had.
K Harris

This thread was discussed between 31/03/2011 and 02/04/2011

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