There will be another F1 driver fatality

Twenty years ago this morning, Formula 1 drivers were invincible. Rubens Barrichello had proved it a day earlier by surviving a sickening impact with the fence at Imola's Variante Bassa.

He was back in the paddock on Saturday morning, unable to race but with only swelling to the nose and lacerations to the mouth. Today, the Brazilian's crash is seen as part of the grim narrative of that dark weekend, yet in the hours before Roland Ratzenberger's fatal accident Barrichello was a living, breathing tribute to modern grand prix car safety even though fellow drivers were shocked by the ferocity of the impact.

Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of Ayrton Senna's death, the last time a driver was killed on a grand prix weekend. Given the incredible escapes witnessed during those two decades, many feel that it will be the last.

But there will be another driver death in F1. That's not a deliberately controversial statement; it's a statistical likelihood on a long enough timeline.

Look back to Imola '94 and the warning signs were emphatically clear. Nelson Piquet in 1987, Gerhard Berger in 1989, Michele Alboreto in 1991 and Ricciardo Patrese in 1992 all sustained injuries in big accidents at the Tamburello left-hander. Yet in 1994, the wall was still there, around nine metres beyond the track, and able to claim Senna's life.

Robert Kubica's 2007 Canadian GP crash escape is testament to safety progress © LAT

Today's warning signs are nothing like as emphatic. Incredible work has been done on safety by many hugely dedicated people. Research conducted by the FIA Institute points to a number of crashes in F1 that would very likely have had grave consequences but for advances in safety technology during the past two decades. But very safe does not equal completely safe.

It's a numbers game. Critics glibly complain about the lack of 'danger' in modern F1, as if fatal accidents and injuries that a driver will feel every day for the rest of their lives are a necessary part of 'the show'. But when you are hurtling round circuits at these speeds, wheel-to-wheel with your rivals, there are enough variables that eventually the combination of factors needed to expose a driver to a fatal accident will align.

So what have the warning signs been? Inevitably, the most concerning situation is airborne crashes. The most obvious recent examples of this are Mark Webber's Red Bull being launched over Heikki Kovalainen's Lotus in Valencia in 2010 and Nico Rosberg's Mercedes over Narain Karthikeyan's HRT in the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix two years later.

This has been tackled with the new regulations lowering the height of the nose, but raises legitimate questions about the danger of submarining, where the front of the car goes under the rear of another. As the rear crash structures are extremely robust, the consequences of a driver's head hitting one could be devastating.

There is no easy answer on this one; the current rules reduce the chances of an airborne car, which is the preferable as it ensures cars and debris are contained within the circuit rather than risking the lives of marshals and spectators. But this is a clear trade-off. You can prevent one set of circumstances, but run the risk of another arising because, in general terms, there is no middle road. Accidents happen.

The FIA Institute has been testing rollhoop designs to increase driver protection

The research is ongoing. The analysis into the possibility of some kind of canopy, or forward-facing cage structure to protect the driver's head, has been going on for several years at the FIA Institute, which has done remarkable work in motorsport safety since its creation.

Understandably, there is a dislike of this as it goes against the tradition of grand prix cars being open-cockpit. But when it comes to safety, arguments based on history are to be taken with a pinch of salt. The research will dictate whether this is the right move, with data and well-constructed experiments establishing if it is indeed safer. If something along these lines is proved to improve safety, it would be folly to ignore it.

The progress made in circuit design has been enormous. Tracks are designed to create theoretical zero-speed impacts, whereby a car going off should have scrubbed off all of its speed when it hits the wall. But there are exceptions; Monaco, a circuit that has changed surprisingly little since the first grand prix there in 1929, for example.

There was a warning sign last year. When Max Chilton drifted across on Pastor Maldonado, the Williams driver speared headfirst into the barrier at Tabac. It was a heavy impact, but thanks to the Tec-Pro barrier and HANS device, the Venezeulan was fine. But it's a reminder of what can go wrong.

In GP3 in 2012, Conor Daly was launched off the back of Dmitry Suranovich's car on the approach to the chicane and hit the top of the fence on the left side of the track before rebounding back towards the circuit. He escaped, but it wouldn't have taken a vastly different set of circumstances for him to have cleared the fence.

Monaco is not fundamentally dangerous and plenty has been done to protect drivers. After all, only three drivers (Luigi Fagioli, Dennis Taylor and Lorenzo Bandini) have lost their lives as a result of accidents there. But by its very nature it is a less controlled environment.

Massa's accident in 2009 shows drivers will never be invincible, despite safety improvements © LAT

Then there are the freak accidents, such as Felipe Massa at the Hungaroring in 2009. He struck a rear damper spring shed by Rubens Barrichello's Brawn during qualifying. The spring weighed just 833g, but at such high speed that was enough to penetrate his helmet and give him a potentially life-threatening injury.

While changes have been made since then, notably the application of a Zylon strip across the top of the visor that is incredibly effective at reducing the risk of penetration, the visor area is an unavoidable weak spot, as Maria de Villota's horrific accident in 2012 demonstrated. Drivers have to see and the brain is vulnerable, especially if you get cars or parts of cars airborne.

This is why drivers are so cautious about safety and content to voice concerns when things don't seem right to them. Inevitably, there are fans who then complain, but if you are going to pillory those who do raise concerns, how is it any different to the days when drivers were afraid to speak out 40-50 years ago?

And it's not only about the drivers. Marshal Paolo Ghislimberti died during the 2000 Italian GP, while Graham Beveridge lost his life in the following year's Australian race just six months later. Then there was the tragic case of Mark Robinson, killed recovering Esteban Gutierrez's Sauber after last year's Canadian GP.

Robinson's death is a fine example of why complacency breeds danger. It was called a freak accident at the time, but having read the full report into the circumstances, the way the car was being recovered was an accident waiting to happen.

Grosjean was handed a one-race ban for the first-corner crash at Spa in 2009 © LAT

Escaping horrific accidents has now become the norm. It's very rare for a driver to be kept out of a race through injuries nowadays and many of those watching from the comfort of their sofas will probably assume that the days of risk have gone. Drivers deserve respect for what they do, not to be told they need to put their lives in danger for our entertainment.

Safety is a matter to be taken seriously and to dismiss the modern F1 driver as lacking courage just because they have the crazy idea of not dying or being maimed for our entertainment is morally questionable.

A total of 350 grand prix weekends have come and gone since that tragic Imola weekend. And hopefully many, many more will pass without the worst happening.

Progress made means that when there is another fatality, it will be an unusual set of circumstances and thanks to that, it will hopefully be a very long time before the worst does happen.

And when that happens lessons will be learned, new safety technologies will be adopted and drivers will be put in even less danger. That's why it's so frustrating to hear people cite "luck" when drivers escape huge accidents because safety technology has done its job. Actually such escapes are a result of well-implemented improvements made by those at the motorsport safety coalface.

What must never be allowed to happen is to assume that, simply because the last two decades have been safe, things will always remain that way.

After all, Ratzenberger and Senna reminded us of something similar 20 years ago.