Safety leaps saved Burti, says F1's Prof

Schumacher's Ferrari suffered a gearbox problem at the start of Sunday's race, preventing the German making a quick getaway from the second row of the grid. He was hit from behind by the unsighted Burti's Prost, sending the Brazilian' car spectacularly into the air before landing on top of Enrique Bernoldi's Arrows.

Remarkably, no one was hurt in the 100mph-plus smash, thanks, in the main, to the way a modern Formula 1 car is built.

"In the '60s and '70s, for every 10 accidents there was a fatality or a severely injured driver," Watkins told the Daily Mirror. "The changes really began in the '70s in terms of developing barriers and catch fencing to slow the car. By the late '70s further development saw the problem of fires begin to disappear thanks to better materials and changes in fuel tank design.

"The next significant advance was using carbon fibre to make the chassis," explained the professor. "We strengthened the frame around the legs and introduced a frontal impacter."

That enabled Burti to walk away from Sunday's crash relatively unscathed. The Prost driver only suffered from a sore arm, which later caused him to slide out of the race.

However, improvements to driver safety is an on-going process and Watkins said the next area is the development of HANS - a head and neck support system.

"The next big step is the use of the head retention system called HANS," he added. "It is mounted on the driver's shoulders and retained by the safety harness to limit the forward movement and distortion of the head."

HANS is widely used in the US-based CART and IRL series, and is being experimented with in NASCAR and the DTM touring car series. As yet it hasn't been used in a Formula 1 race, despite drivers such as David Coulthard trying the system in testing.