Moss: « F1 has become as dangerous as football »

In an interview with Motorline, Stirling Moss, recently retired from auto racing, believes that danger made competition more thrilling in the past than it is today: « It attracted us. Auto racing was a very dangerous sport, and if you were a young man, you wanted to experience something exciting. I just didn’t care, the risk didn’t matter. I just wanted to feel that I was driving a racing car as fast as possible, that’s all I thought about when I was in the car. »

However, thanks to the awareness-raising work of Jackie Stewart and, more sadly, following the deaths of Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, Formula One has taken driver safety seriously and continues to this day to experiment with solutions to address all possible flaws, as evidenced by research into a device – bubble, reinforced visor, or roll cage – to further protect drivers’ heads: « Formula One has become a safe sport. It has become as dangerous as football. It’s fantastic; the cars are built with carbon fiber and can withstand incredible forces. There has been a lot of progress. »

The four-time world runner-up partially attributes this evolution to the rampant media coverage of the discipline: « I think times have changed. An athlete dying in competition is now considered unacceptable. After the war, if an athlete died in a race it was terrible of course, but it wasn’t completely intolerable. Today, it is no longer tolerated at all. »

The London native seems to consider, however, that Formula One may have become too safe and that it no longer necessarily represents the same challenge or offers the same excitement as in his time, particularly due to the vast run-off areas of modern circuits: « I think today’s Formula One would be even more exciting if we built walls along the edge of the track, throughout the entire course. That way, we would see how good the current drivers really are. »