Crash course in the fast lane

Accidents are part of the game, causing damages to the car but teams have ways to deal with them.

Andrea de Cesaris has the dubious distinction of being the Formula One driver who raced in the most Grands Prix without a victory: 208. But the Italian driver, who was in the series from 1980 to 1994, is remembered more for something else: his specialty early in his career of crashing cars, which earned him the nickname of “de Crasheris.”

In 1981, his second year in the series, while racing at the McLaren team he destroyed 18 car chassis and finished only six of his 14 races. The atmosphere around him in the team garage got so bad that at the Dutch Grand Prix, when he qualified 13th on the grid, the team withdrew his car from the race, fearing he would crash it again.

De Cesaris survived the early crashes and went on to have far fewer, remaining the ninth-most-prolific driver of Grand Prix races in history. That says at least one thing about racing accidents and team tolerance: If a driver has talent, a certain number of crashes are tolerated. In fact, with hardly a race in which a driving accident of some kind does not happen, crashes are seen as part of the game.

So accidents happen, and they can disrupt a race weekend any time from the two Friday practice sessions to the Saturday practice, or qualifying runs, and the actual race on Sunday.

While the main concern of any team is that there be no injuries — among drivers, spectators and Formula One personnel — every accident nonetheless takes its toll. If only because when a car is damaged in an accident, it costs the team a hefty sum to repair it.
Some of that money comes from sponsors and broadcasters, which, ironically, invest in the sport because of the excitement of risk and danger that it conveys.

Accidents are the measure upon which much is judged, primarily the skill of the driver to go as fast as possible, pushing the limits, without having an accident. That’s why every member of a Formula One team is ready to assume the consequences — aside from human injury — of an accident.

Every accident has its financial costs. According to Ross Brawn, director of the Mercedes team, Formula One teams take into account in their annual budgets the costs of spare parts needed for repairs in case of accidents.

“I’m not going to tempt fate by saying the wrong thing here, but there is a factor,” Brawn said. "But the cars develop so quickly and often you are introducing new parts and superseding old parts anyway.

“Of course, if it starts getting heavy, then the funds have to come from somewhere and they nearly always come out of the development budget,” he added. “There is a certain amount of money and it is fixed. So if you start having a lot of expensive accidents, then it starts to impact other areas and so it needs careful management.”

John Booth, director of the Marussia team, said that the timing of a crash — when it comes during the season — can also decide the level of the cost.

“The biggest impact on costs is which part of the year the accident happens,” Booth said. “Because often, let’s say the last five or six races, you have parts that you don’t need replaced because they have to be timed, 'lifed-out,' anyway.

If it happens at the start of the year, then the component needs replacing immediately. So an accident in the last three or four races can almost be a 'free accident,' whereas at the start of the year every component is a cost.”

Unlike for an individual who crashes a Ferrari road car and must write off a car that costs as much as a house, a Formula One team budgets differently.

A team’s annual budget varies depending on where it sits on the grid, ranging anywhere from $80 million at the back to $300 million at the front. The car is a constantly evolving machine that is also built and rebuilt between races and during the race weekend.

Costs may still be broken down in general terms. Booth said the best way to do that was through the most common forms of accident, by breaking down the costs as they relate to the area of the car that needs replacing: for example, the nose and front wing in a frontal impact; a rear wing and impact structure; or a corner of the car, which is a wheel and a suspension arm that goes with that wheel. Normally, an impact with a wheel requires replacing the whole corner.

Booth said a nose and wing assembly costs £47,936, or $73,730; a rear corner costs £71,678 and a front corner costs £66,742. He noted that the team never pressures a driver about avoiding accidents for cost reasons, however.

“Very rarely, sometimes if we have a new component to try and we only have one or one for each car, and they go out in the first session to try that component, then we may ask them to bear that fact in mind,” he added. “But that’s the only time. It’s our responsibility to make sure that we have enough spares for the car at all times.”

One cost to the team that is less easily measured is the human manpower that is required in the garage. The mechanics have to rebuild the car, and this can happen during a Saturday morning practice, just two hours before qualifying. Sometimes they have to stay up all night rebuilding a car before the race.

Aside from extreme cases like that of de Cesaris, when mechanics refused to work on yet another broken car, mechanics consider repairs to be part of the job, according to Booth and other team directors.

“You never see a change of tempo, or mood,” Booth said. “They just get on with it, that’s what they are here to do. Most of them have been in racing a long time and they understand the dynamics of it. They see an accident on the TV and all they think about is getting the car back in the garage and getting it repaired and getting started. They’re used to going without sleep; it’s what they do.”

Xevi Pujolar, the chief race engineer of the Williams team, pointed out, however, that the prime concern is safety. The first thing the team does is to try to understand how and why the accident happened.

“You try to understand if the accident was because of a mistake, or if something broke,” Pujolar said. “If something broke, then we really need to be careful. Then we need to understand if it was a part that broke on the car. If so, we bring the other car in and we stop running until we understand what happened. If it is a driver mistake or something, like he just went wide, then we just fix the car and get it back out there.”

So given all the costs of an accident to the team and the mechanics, do drivers think about their responsibility?

The Marussia driver Jules Bianchi outlined the driver’s thought processes before, during and after an accident, using his recent crash last month at the Monaco Grand Prix as an example.

“The first thing that comes to mind,” he said, “is that you sense that you are going to have an accident - as in Monaco, I saw I broke something and could no longer stop - and I thought, 'Am I going to hurt myself, or what?' So I lifted my hands from the steering wheel in order to not hurt my hands.

And then when you get out of the car and you are OKand you look at the car, you say, 'The mechanics are going to have some work to do.”
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It also depends on how much money a team has, according to Esteban Gutiérrez, a driver at the Sauber team, which is not one of the richest in the series.

But most drivers agreed that the whole team expects them to take risks in order to win the race. Ultimately, the mechanics are so used to building and rebuilding the car that the extra work of an accident doesn’t affect their job much nor the car itself.

“It’s pretty much like a crash anyway every night in the garage in terms of the guys pulling the car apart and putting it back together again,” said Mark Webber, a driver at the Red Bull team.