Andrew Frankel: ‘Did a modern safety system cause an avoidable accident?’

A friend of mine was involved in a car crash the other day. Nothing too serious and thankfully no one hurt beyond seatbelt bruising, but the point is she is adamant it was a modern safety system on the car she was driving that was at least partly to blame. I’m not going to name the car  partly because I didn’t witness the accident but also because I suspect the alleged flaw in its accident prevention strategies is common in many other makes of car too.

She was leaving a motorway and on a short slip road approaching a roundabout at the bottom. The Audi in front braked quite heavily and just as she was about to do the same in response, the car intervened and performed a full-on emergency stop. What the car didn’t take into account was the elderly Vauxhall Zafira following her, just a little too close. Result: my friend’s car stopped fully five metres before the car in front, and was duly collected by the Zafira, with terminal consequences for  the latter if not, mercifully, its occupants.

Of course the accident was mainly the fault of the Zafira driver, who was too close and did not react in time. But my friend is adamant that had her car not wrested control from her, she’d have been able to stop far closer to the Audi, giving the Zafira more time and space certainly to reduce its speed at impact or, quite possibly, avoid it altogether.

I appear to have spent a lot of time in deserts recently. I was in the Sahara to drive the Porsche 911 Dakar but also in the Saudi desert chasing the Dakar Rally for a couple of days, an event brilliantly described by Dominic Tobin last month [The middle of nowhere]. What Dom lacked the space to explain was how we got around the desert in the first place.

We were out there with Toyota who produced a small fleet of its full-sized ‘300’ SUVs – the modern version of the old Amazon sadly no longer sold in the UK, and told us to follow the leader into the desert. The ‘leader’ in this case was a veteran of seven Dakars himself, and in mood to hang around.

But because no one outside the organisers knows the route of the rally from day to day in anything more than the most approximate detail (even competitors have no map and are only given digital turn by turn instructions mere minutes before departure), it was a voyage into the complete unknown. We just blundered off into the vast wilderness and hoped.

What we were desperate to see was one of the helicopters that chase the rally to record coverage and, if necessary, provide rapid evacuation. One of those on the horizon gave you something to aim at, the only problem being it moved as fast as the fastest competitors so you had to head for where you thought it was going, rather than where it actually was.

“If the budget was decimated would the racing be any worse?”

And then we saw a white speck atop an enormous dune, which out here for those looking for a rally is akin to finding not merely a needle in a haystack, but a crock of gold at the end of a rainbow. In a desert of over 2.1 million square kilometres, we had found a medical car. Find one of these and the Dakar will not be far behind.

We stayed for a couple of hours, seeing how close we dared get to the competitors – far too close for comfort as it turns out, but wonderfully exhilarating – before climbing back into our enormous Toyotas and using them to bludgeon dunes into submission once more. I still scarcely believe what we threw at those cars, even less that they took it. You understand more clearly than ever why, in environments where breaking down means no mere inconvenience but a genuine matter of life and death, people tend to drive Toyotas like these. By the time I handed mine back, the windscreen was cracked in five places, the underbody protection was gone and bits of plastic trim were hanging off it front  and back. But it felt as good as ever. Others in the convoy were no better.

“It’ll take them a while to patch those up,” I observed to one of the guides. “No it won’t,” he replied, “they’ll just send them back to the rental company…”

Is it hopelessly naive to take exception to the current situation where the Formula 1 teams appear to have a say in which new teams, if any, come to the grid? For them the upside is zero because at best it carves the cake into smaller slices, at worst it introduces new and unwelcome competition. So they will always try to stop newcomers, acting directly against what I am sure would be the wishes of the fans; not that that should be any great surprise.

I agree that F1 needs to be careful about letting no-hopers onto the grid who’ll add little or nothing to the spectacle, but  I don’t think you’ll find a fan in the world who’d not welcome grids of, say, 26 or 28 cars. But the price of entry is so steep, not least because it includes a £160m bung, that Toto Wolff has said the effective entry budget for a team hoping to be competitive is around £800m.

The figure is grotesquely too high. Ask yourself this: if that number was decimated and all the big teams walked away in a huff to be replaced by a far larger number of smaller teams who could no more afford £800m than jump over the moon, but to whom the scarcely modest sum of £80m might be doable, would the cars be meaningfully slower? Would the racing be any worse? Would the fans suffer as a result? We all know the answers. So it should happen. But will it? Not a chance.

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A former editor of Motor Sport, Andrew splits his time between testing the latest road cars and racing (mostly) historic machinery
Follow Andrew on Twitter @Andrew_Frankel