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Car racing accidents
For a lot of people one of the attractions of car racing is the chance to see an accident. Given how safe most modern race cars are the consequences of an accident are not all that serious so it is something that spectators can enjoy.
Accidents are a part of car racing, in order to be the fastest it is necessary to push the limit and that means that accidents are inevitably going to happen. That being said they are not all that common these days in large part due to the massive increase in safety features. It may seem like there are a lot of accidents but this is mainly because every time that there is one it appears on every news broadcast the world over. Most accidents when they do occur are fairly minor, but this has not always been the case.
In the early days of racing accidents occurred all the time, even the winner of the race usually had to recover from an accident. Unfortunately many accidents in the early days were fatal. There were few if any safety features on early racing cars and as a result the driver who survived more than a few years was something of a rarity. Even more disturbing is that as the cars improved and got faster there was virtually no effort put into improving the safety for drivers.
Right up through the sixties there was virtually nothing in the way of safety features being added to either the cars or the tracks. This would all start to change in the seventies when it was realized that the cars were getting to be too fast and the dangers were just too great. The improvements since then have been amazing and have now reached the point where car racing is actually quite safe despite the high speeds that are currently being reached. That being said there is a bit of an issue with the technology making it possible for cars to go so fast that the safety features will not be adequate. To get around this most racing series have introduced rules specifically to slow the cars down.
One area where it has been necessary to make improvements in safety is for the spectators at the race. At the early events they simply stood track side and were exposed to the danger of a car or pieces of it flying into the crowd. This happened on several occasions but it was the tragedy at the 1955 Le Mans 24 Hours that forced changes to occur. At this race a car went into a grandstand killing 82 spectators. Following this racing was actually made illegal in many places and was not allowed to resume until improvements in safety had been made. The result is that today there is very little danger to the spectators at the events although there have on occasion been incidents of spectators getting hit.