Safety has always been of paramount importance in grand prix racing, with tremendous advances in the area that have thankfully seen 14 years now pass since the last fatality, when
Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger were tragically killed at Imola over the weekend of the San Marino Grand Prix back in 1994.
Both BMW-Sauber's
Robert Kubica – in Montreal last year – and Kovalainen are able to pay tribute to the remarkable progress made in saving them from injury, with esteemed medical advisor Dr Steve Olvey, director of the neuroscience intensive care unit at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami and a founding member of
FIA's safety division, suggesting the Finn would have been dead had his Barcelona accident happened ten years earlier [see separate story –
click here].
“It is not only luck that I came out of the crash,” Kovalainen underlined. “It is really the work that has paid off. I can't be more than thankful about that, but we should carry on working on improving as much as we can. If there are any other areas we think we can improve, then we should go for it.”
“His accident and my accident in Canada have shown that safety standards in
F1 are very high,” concurred Kubica, “and we have people working on it trying to improve more.”
