F1's blame game: Why most fans look at crashes the wrong way

This column is about Formula 1 accidents – and specifically the now de rigueur kneejerk reaction among TV commentators, pundits, journalists, and fans to seek always to apportion blame to one driver or t’other – as though that were the most important issue. It is not the most important issue. From a team’s perspective the most important issue is the fact of the crash itself, because it means that a win, a podium, and/or points have been lost. Above all, and at almost all costs, that loss is what teams want to avoid. Avoiding that loss, indeed, is one of the principal routes via which F1 world championships are won.

A perfect recent example was provided by the Checo Pérez–Carlos Sainz coming-together on the straight between Turn 2 and Turn 3 in Baku two weekends ago. Immediately after their cars had collided, social media became deluged with TV commentators, pundits, journalists, and fans rushing to apportion blame to either Pérez or Sainz. But from Red Bull’s and Ferrari’s vantage points the most important issue was not the allocation of culpability but the unnecessary dropping of points. That deprivation was felt most grievously by Red Bull, which was and remains locked in a neck-and-neck battle for the financially all-important F1 constructors’ world championship with McLaren, whose drivers Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris scored 38 points in Azerbaijan, while Max Verstappen, the only Red Bull driver to finish the race and thereby trouble the scorers, earned his team just 10 points.

Yes, I am well aware that Pérez kept to a straight line, so on the one hand you could say that he was technically blameless. But, on the other hand, far more relevant from an F1 world championship point of view, which is the frame of reference that matters to the drivers’ employers much more than the ifs and buts of their post-shunt bickering, was that he had failed to utilise the abundant available space to his left. Had he done so, he would have avoided a race-ending shunt – and he would have scored crucial F1 world championship points for his team. In that context, being technically blameless was a worthless irrelevance.

Pérez did almost exactly the same thing four months ago, at Monaco, alongside Kevin Magnussen’s Haas, and in almost exactly the same way he thereby squandered a potential points-scoring opportunity. In each case he was not penalised – and in each case TV commentators, pundits, journalists, and fans focused on the fact that he had not been penalised, and, in the case of Monaco, on the fact that by contrast Magnussen had. But that is not actually what mattered most. As I say, what mattered most was that Pérez had failed to score points for his team – a team that, as a result of his failures, has now been overtaken for the lead of the all-important and all-lucrative F1 constructors’ world championship, I might add.

In F1 days of yore, there was much less verbal squabbling about accidents – for the simple reason that drivers tried their utmost not to have them. In my opinion the change — in other words drivers’ diminishing aversion to crashes and the resulting enthusiasm that almost all F1 stakeholders have developed for analysing them as though they were a routine aspect of racing rather than potentially life-threatening catastrophes to be avoided at any price — has come about as a result of four main factors.

(1) The tremendous safety improvements that we have seen over the past decades have been and remain a crucial influence, because, although serious injury and even death are still possible in F1, of course they are, today’s drivers have learned their trade to the accompaniment of an unconscious reliance on a feeling of near-immortality of which the drivers of previous eras would have had no comprehension. Improved safety is of course an extremely good thing. However, as a result of it, F1 drivers can now crash with a far greater degree of impunity than ever they could before.

(2) Another significant influencer was the sometimes feral on-track behaviour of two truly brilliant drivers, Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher, whom many of our current crop of F1 superstars grew up to venerate perhaps too uncritically. Senna and Schumacher raced more belligerently than any F1 world champions ever had before — with the possible exception of the first ever F1 world champion, Giuseppe Farina — and, inevitably marked out as role models by their supreme ability and prodigious success, not to mention their bewitching charisma, they serially co-created a new and game-changing on-track modus operandi that the next generation of F1 aces has largely emulated. By the way, it is possible to hold Ayrton’s and Michael’s genius in high regard, yet also to decry the way they gave their rivals insufficient quarter on track; that is my attitude to them, and, if it is not already yours, I recommend that you consider adopting it.

(3) The ever more assiduous race stewarding in terms of the awarding of penalties and penalty points inevitably focuses the attention of drivers, TV commentators, pundits, journalists, and fans on post-accident finger-pointing. What’s more, it actually, paradoxically, and unhelpfully normalises crashing, increasingly treating it in much the same way as football referees deal with players’ fouling one another. Yes, F1 drivers have been penalised and even occasionally banned in the past for unruly driving – Romain Grosjean in 2012, Eddie Irvine in 1994, Nigel Mansell in 1989, and Riccardo Patrese in 1978 spring instantly to my mind – but such punishments were comparatively rare, and, with hindsight, some of them were patently excessive. In the same way, Magnussen’s 2024 Azerbaijan Grand Prix ban was criticised by many of his fellow F1 drivers, including even Pierre Gasly, the driver with whom he had collided in the previous race, at Monza, which alleged malfeasance had earned him the two penalty points that had raised his total to 12, the threshold that triggers a race ban.

(4) Last but far from least, we must not underestimate the influence of the aforementioned over-focus on the issue of apportioning blame in mainstream and social media alike, which negative effect is further encouraged by the live broadcast on the global F1 TV feed of the drivers’ transparently artful radio complaints.

Or, if you like, let’s put it this way. Accidents have always happened in F1, of course they have, and serious injury or worse was far more common in the past than it is now. That positive sea-change must always be celebrated. But the greats of F1’s much more dangerous past – Alberto Ascari, Juan Manuel Fangio, Stirling Moss, Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart et al – had accidents from time to time, yes, but they raced one another always with margin. What they never did was recklessly nerf one another into the barriers then bitch about it afterwards.