I still haven’t figured out how the guy ended up between the two cars. check out the race action with the ambulance on the circuit. Very happy F1 has progressed beyond these lacking standards from back in the ‘80’s...
On the grid one mechanic was still crouching behind Patrese's car trying to start it when the race started, apparently.
Wasn't there a similar accident at a Montreal GP? I vaguely remember these scenes watching them on live TV. It was awful.
Not quite, as there was no Mechanic involved. You are thinking of Ricardo Paletti who started well back on the grid and struck Didier Peroni’s car which had stalled at the front of the grid. Crash and fire was fatal to Paletti. 1982
During free practice of the same race another mechanic was injured in the pit lane (I think he was hit by Reutemann) and died the next Monday. IIRC, the guy who was hit at the start survived.
During practice, Giovanni Amadeo, a mechanic from the Osella team, literally fell from the pitwall onto the track in front of Reutemann’s car, who was unable to avoid him or even brake. The poor man broke his skull in the fall, and died on the Monday after the race. The mechanics staged a protest before the race, followed by some of the drivers also: the Zolder pits were always overcrowded and too narrow. Carlos Reutemann won the race (the last of his 12 wins in Formula One) but was deeply moved by the accident ; he didn’t celebrate on the podium, and, if my memory serves me well, visited the dying man in the hospital after the race ( ?? Was it already forty years ago ? Yes it was !). Rgds
As said above, the cause ot the poor man's death was not the shock from Reutemann's car, which was not going very fast at the moment, but his skull breaking when he fell on the pitlane track's tarmac, just in front of the incoming Reutemann's car. Zolder's paddock lane was akwardly narrow, and the adjacent paddock always too crowded. Rgds
Here is the story of Dave Luckett, the mechanic injured at the start...I saw it live...it was actually an indirect consequence of a protest after Giovanni Amadeo's accident; a seminal weekend for F1 procedural safety. Luckett was more fortunate, he fully recovered from his injuries. In 1992 I met Siegfried Stohr in Modena and he just stated it had been a nightmare.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Belgian_Grand_Prix In 1987 I raced there in Formula Ford and saw the circuit was very badly managed. Even in FFords we found the pitlane a joke. Then when I went off into the gravel in practice the tractor pulling my car out of the kitty litter with a chain or rope attached to the roll bar was manned by two idiots who were too busy chatting and looking forward not paying attention to the fact that the back end of the chassis was burying itself in the gravel and the whole car was about to be turned end over end: thankfully I was out of the car not in it. I had to run through the gravel to catch up with their line of sight. By the time they braked after finally seeing me gesticulating the front wheels were 4 or 5 feet off the ground...What made up for it was being on track with the 512M Sunoco during mixed practice, that was very special
