After the spectacular engine fire at the Austrian Grand Prix in Spielberg, Carlos Sainz initially criticized the rescue measures taken by track safety as “a bit slow”. The Österreichring safety relay, which was used in Formula 1 at the Red Bull Ring, is now responding to this criticism in a statement.
It says literally: “After the terrible accident of Jules Bianchi in 2014, the rules of the FIA regarding salvage and interventions on the race track were drastically tightened. Intervention is only permitted on instructions from Race Control. On the one hand, this of course increases the safety of the drivers and marshals, but has the downside that interventions take a bit longer.”
“In the incident with Carlos Sainz in turn 4, several seemingly unfortunate circumstances came together. The spot where Sainz parked the Ferrari was not visible from the marshals’ stand. They received instructions over the radio to take fire extinguishers to the vehicle to go.”
“When they saw the situation, they made the decision to catch up with the fire engine (S-Wagen). This decision had to be made within seconds and, in retrospect, was absolutely right.”
Why was an S car called?
“If you look back at the Grosjean accident [in Bahrain 2020] remembered: In such a situation, hand-held fire extinguishers are absolutely not enough. So the fire extinguisher was turned off and the vehicle caught up, leading to this unfortunate TV image of the marshal ‘running away’.”
Another problem was that Sainz “understandably got nervous in the vehicle and released the brake too early. The wedge had to be pushed under the rolling vehicle, which of course made the whole thing extremely difficult. However, the resistance of the wedge caused the vehicle to steer and stopped at the guard rail. The fire was then extinguished with just a few pushes of the extinguisher.”
The track safety had previously been criticized not only by Sainz, but also by other racers on Twitter and by TV commentators. For example, one reporter mocked that a route safety employee might not have been trained enough to do his job under high pressure in the best possible way.
The safety relay describes itself as a “motorsports-loving squad that sacrifices its free time for training and exercises in order to make our best possible contribution to safety along the route at such events. We will also use this incident as an opportunity to continue to improve. “
“Of course, when you look at the TV images and the recordings of the course cameras, you will find things that need to be improved afterwards. We will also discuss these internally and discuss them with our people.”
Route safety: Fire is not an everyday situation
“But in this exceptional situation – because a fire is not an everyday occurrence for us either – the marshals reacted well overall. After less than 30 seconds we had a fire engine on site with which we could have brought a rapidly spreading fire under control .”
“Since Grosjean’s accident, it has been very important to us to immediately have a lot of extinguishing action on site in order to protect the driver as best as possible. Another emergency vehicle was already ready and a third was on the way. Also in the event that Sainz didn’t If he had gotten out of the vehicle on his own, we could have protected him as best we could.”
For Sainz, according to the Ferrari driver himself, it was “not an ideal and not an easy situation. I saw in the mirror that the car caught fire. At the same time I braked. When I tried to jump out of the car, the car started roll backwards. But I didn’t want to just let the car roll away.”
“So I called for the marshals to help me put something under the tires. This whole process was a bit slow. At one point the fire was so bad that I had to jump out. That’s when a marshal came and put the car out. We definitely need to look at that to see what could have happened a little quicker because it wasn’t a comfortable situation.”