Lando Norris: "halo is one of the best things F1 has changed"
“The pivotal moment is seeing him jump out the car. That’s what changes everything.” Lando Norris is preparing for the Sakhir Grand Prix, the second weekend in a row in Bahrain, the last outing overshadowed by Romain Grosjean’s crash, and subsequent lucky escape. It’s hard to talk about anything else.
“Once you hear he’s okay, that’s awesome. Then you have to re-engage and start focusing on your start in an hour and a half.” A start which led McLaren’s young British driver to a fourth-place finish, among his best results in 2020.
“Seeing him jump out allows you, more than anything, to jump back in the car with some focus. I don’t want to think what would have happened if he hadn’t jumped out, but that’s a completely different story. As soon as you see a driver get out there’s just a lot of relief. In the moments you don’t know - that’s when you start thinking about a lot of things, and it’s very difficult to go out and just drive again.
“It’s tough, because you think of the worst, you think that it could have been you. And you’re one out of 20 drivers, why could that not have been you if you were just a few millimetres wider, or if you made a bit of contact with another driver? Something like that could happen to anyone on the grid.
“Eventually you put your helmet on and you have to switch your mentality and almost try and forget what just happened. Because it’s very rare, I think you just believe in more positive things. You’ve just got to go out and do your job and believe it won’t happen to you, and that it won’t happen to anyone else for a very long time. Hopefully never.”
Given how rare accidents of this severity are in modern Formula One, does Lando think safety is perhaps taken a little for granted?
“Absolutely. You don’t expect to see these things. Whether it was the halo for example, or the amount of fire and safety equipment we have to wear, or the jump-out tests we have to do to make sure we get out in a certain amount of time… sometimes you think ‘why do I have to do this?’ But when you have moments like this that prove every example. Romain’s life was probably saved because of the halo.
“It proved to all those people who didn’t like the halo a few years ago that it’s probably one of the best things that Formula One has changed in a very long time. I think everyone takes safety for granted sometimes, certainly a lot of people.
“As drivers we know better than anyone when things are safe and things are dangerous because we’re the ones experiencing it. Fans maybe take safety and what we do for granted because they haven’t been in the position of driving a Formula One car in these conditions.
Something like this proved a lot of people wrong and I hope it made everyone realise a bit more the risks we take, and the dangers that are still within F1 even nowadays.”
