Where this was said
Senna's Crash and a New Era for Safety
At 1:19:55 · chapter starts 1:19:54
The sport's fatality count had dropped dramatically across the decades: 14 deaths in the 1950s, 14 in the 1960s, 12 in the 1970s, 4 in the 1980s, and only 2 in the 1990s — before that one terrible May weekend at Imola in 1994, when Roland Ratzenberger and then Ayrton Senna were both killed. Senna was the three-time champion, the undisputed best driver of his generation, arguably of all time. His funeral in São Paulo drew approximately 3 million people and remains believed to be the largest attended public funeral in history. The sport's response was systematic and sustained: limited aerodynamics to slow cornering speeds, grooved tires in 1998 to reduce grip, deformable crash structures and survival cells for the cockpit, upgraded track barriers and enlarged runoff areas, and finally — in response to the 2014 era crashes — the halo in 2018. The halo created a rigid titanium structure around the driver's head, with a bar directly in their field of view, and has saved at least three lives. Since Jules Bianchi's death in 2014, Formula 1 has had no fatalities, the longest such stretch in its history. Paradoxically, David notes, slowing the cars through safety regulations only intensifies the engineering arms race — the harder it is to go fast, the more every team is incentivized to spend every dollar finding loopholes. [1] — Ben Gilbert "Ayrton Senna's death in 1994 came as a shock because fatalities had been dropping — from 14 per decade in the 50s–70s to just 2 in the enti…" 1:19:53
Formula 1 has had zero driver fatalities since 2014 — the longest stretch without a fatal accident in the sport's history — largely credited to the halo device introduced in 2018.
In 1993, Bernie Ecclestone was the highest-paid corporate executive in Britain, taking home $44.5 million in cash — and that was only what was reported to the Crown.
