Why F1's safety priorities are misplaced

Although, following his return to Williams from Ferrari in 1991, Nigel Mansell and I went through what may be termed a period of estrangement - I didn't like some of the things he did, and he didn't like some of the things I wrote - through most of his 13 years in Formula 1 we got along extremely well, and some of my most enjoyable, no-punches-pulled, interviews were conducted with Nigel.

The times, of course, were different. To organise an interview in this era means setting it up well ahead of time with the relevant team's PR staff, but back in the day F1 people were rather less rarefied: you simply spoke to the driver or engineer or team principal, and agreed a time and place. I remember, for example, one year interviewing Mansell over breakfast in his hotel room in Detroit, after which we walked to the track, and he got on with his day's work.

Since Mansell's retirement, things have again been fine between us, but even when they were not I invariably found myself in agreement with his beliefs about how F1 should be, as James Roberts's recent interview with him served to confirm.

I was therefore not surprised to learn of his distaste for the halo, which will disfigure F1 cars from now on: indeed, of all the former drivers to whom I have spoken on the subject, only Jackie Stewart is in support of it.

Niki Lauda has described the adoption of the halo as 'the worst decision in the history of Formula 1', and if Mansell does not go as far as that, he makes very clear his opposition to it. "I'm not a fan," he told Roberts. "There has to be an element of racing a car and taking some risks, and the drivers are going to be hidden away even more."

Mansell ventures into tricky territory here: as Stirling Moss long ago came to understand, to suggest that racing should contain risk, that seeking endlessly to eradicate it changes the very nature of the sport, is to invite censure - and then some.

"Towards the end of last season one of the drivers said to me, 'It's put about that the majority of us are in favour of the halo. A lot of us absolutely do not want it'" Martin Brundle

"We need to be careful," Mansell went on. "I hope the halo won't be a hindrance if a driver is trapped upside down, or whether it might cause blind spots. We'll have to see what the cars look like, but my fear is that it might turn a lot of people off." After talking to fans at Autosport International the other week, I would suggest that his fear is well founded.

Martin Brundle is another man adamantly opposed. "I tweeted something about halos a while ago, and got a response from one journalist that rather surprised me. It was sort of, 'Oh, right, leave the drivers' heads exposed in 2018, then? We shouldn't have crash helmets and seat belts, either?'

In my reply I said, 'Helmets and seat belts were the result of rational, logical, decisions, when crashing a car almost certainly meant injury or death. In my opinion, Formula 1 cars and circuits are now safe enough'. I mean, what happens now? Where do we stop? The only logical conclusion - eventually - is driver-less cars..."

At which point assuredly there will be fan-less grandstands, a phenomenon already disturbingly in evidence at some circuits of the world.

Something that really has angered me is the citing by some of Jules Bianchi's accident as justification for introducing the halo. "Yes, me too," said Brundle. "We all have our opinions about the circumstances of that accident, but the halo wouldn't have helped the poor lad in the slightest.

"Another point worth making is that, with it, the cars are going to be 10-15kg heavier - which is more mass to go in the wall at 50G or whatever. This year, with driver and fuel and everything, they're going to go to the grid with 850kg - which is a sportscar, isn't it? My Tyrrell was about 480!

"As well as that, there's the question of getting out of the bloody things in a hurry. Sadly, it doesn't now look as though we're going to see [Robert] Kubica back in Formula 1 - not this year, anyway - but when it seemed as though it was going to happen I asked Jo Bauer how Robert had coped with the evacuation test.

"Amazingly, he told me that he was the fastest guy they'd ever tested - came at it with total enthusiasm, got out within three seconds, and put the steering-wheel back on. Incredible, isn't it? 'It wasn't a problem,' Jo said, 'but we haven't tried him with the halo yet - which is an altogether different thing, of course...'"

The required time to vacate the cockpit is therefore necessarily to be adjusted. "Funny, isn't it?" said Brundle. "Suddenly the getting out time doesn't matter as much as it did! Believe me, getting out of a Formula 1 car in a hurry is very painful - everyone fudges those tests, using different seats and steering-wheels and so on, because the 'knees up past the steering-wheel when it's on' test is so difficult to pass.

"I can still remember the amount of skin I lost from my shins and elbows, practising for it - and now, all of a sudden, it doesn't matter any more! It was just somebody's arbitrary test, wasn't it?

"Towards the end of last season one of the drivers - for his own sake, I'd better not name him - said to me, 'It's put about by the likes of Sebastian Vettel that the majority of us are in favour of the halo - well, let me tell you, that's far from the truth! A lot of us absolutely do not want it.'"

IndyCar, I said, is working on some sort of see-through shield, but has fundamentally said no to the halo. "Yes," Brundle said, "but here the problem is that the second it existed, the genie was out of the bottle..."