{"id":6257,"date":"2012-05-01T10:18:47","date_gmt":"2012-05-01T10:18:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ewanspence.com\/blog\/?p=6257"},"modified":"2012-05-01T10:26:25","modified_gmt":"2012-05-01T10:26:25","slug":"remembering-roland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/2012\/05\/remembering-roland\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Roland"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many years ago, Jim Hughes<\/a> and I had a Formula 1 blog called Fun-1<\/strong>. The goal then was to try and be sarcastic, bitchy, and portray a sport that was almost, not quite unlike, Formula 1. We had a lot of fun with it, but as F1 became more soap opera, it started to read a little bit too much like real news.<\/p>\n

But one of Jim’s posts always stuck with me, and with all the tweets popping up today (May 1st), I wanted to revisit that post. One hunt through backups and archives later, and it gets a re-post here:<\/p>\n

Today is the tenth anniversary of Ayrton Senna\u2019s death at Imola. So what has happened in Formula 1? Are the cars safer, slower, is the driving cleaner? Yes, No and definitely not – Michael\u2019s outrageous punting off of JPM at Imola is graphic evidence of how low F1 driver standards have sunk in the past decade.<\/p>\n

I watched both accidents at Imola ten years ago (I also watched Berger\u2019s accident at Tamburello a few years previously), Ayrton\u2019s didn\u2019t affect me. Maybe I was still in shock, but I never liked the guy. Sure he was exquisitely fast, but his general attitude to racing – if in doubt punt your rivals off – was abhorrent to me, imagine your grief if Michael was killed today? Rightly or wrongly that\u2019s\u00a0 pretty much how I felt about Ayrton.<\/p>\n

Roland Ratzenberger was a different matter; he was one of the good guys. I\u2019d seen him race at Le Mans a few times, and he was no muppet paying for a seat. I believe he was Toyota\u2019s first non-Japanese works driver, which in those days said a lot, even if Toyota\u2019s current approach to employing drivers is somewhat surreal. Just wanting Schumi lite never mind being willing to pay him millions is rather odd\u2026<\/p>\n

Watching a driver (or any human being) being given heart massage\u00a0 on live television is not an everyday sight, and it\u2019s not one I want to see again. But that\u2019s what I saw after Roland\u2019s accident and it was very moving and disturbing. Later in 1994 I went to Le Mans and one of the SARD Toyotas had four drivers\u2019 names painted next to the door, but only three drivers at the circuit; Eddie Irvine, Jeff Krosnoff and Mauro Martini. This is the car that Roland was supposed to have been driving.<\/p>\n

90 minutes from the end of the race it was leading, when it slowed and stopped just past me on the pit straight with a broken gear linkage. Krosnoff got out of the car, went around the back and manually selected third gear. He then set off on a slow lap of the 9 mile circuit before pitting for the linkage to be replaced. The car lost 13 minutes and dropped back to third\u00a0place, 15 seconds behind the second placed car. Irvine cut this lead at a rate of three seconds per lap, and I\u2019ve never seen so many people willing a car to go faster. Irvine took second place on the penultimate lap, but the lead car was a lap ahead, and “Roland\u2019s” team had to settle for second place.<\/p>\n

Roland, Ayrton, rest in peace.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many years ago, Jim Hughes and I had a Formula 1 blog called Fun-1. The goal then was to try and be sarcastic, bitchy, and portray a sport that was almost, not quite unlike, Formula 1. We had a lot of fun with it, but as F1 became more soap opera, it started to read a little bit too much like real news. But one of Jim’s posts always stuck with me, and with all the tweets popping up today (May 1st), I wanted to revisit that post. One hunt through backups and archives later, and it gets a re-post<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[6],"tags":[3613,3611,3612,3614],"class_list":["post-6257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-formula-1","tag-ayrton-senna","tag-imola","tag-roland-ratzenberger","tag-simtek"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p58Gl0-1CV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6257\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}