Nigel Roebuck: Fifth Column

For the second time in three weeks we had on Saturday one of those accidents that brings a collective gasp in the press room, and then near silence.

It was 'a bad one'. When Ernesto Viso crashed on the opening lap of the GP2 race at Magny-Cours, one's initial thought - as with Robert Kubica's shunt at Montreal - was that the driver was unlikely to have survived.

Viso's car took off, to some considerable degree, then barrel-rolled down a trackside wall, before finally coming to rest - right side up - a considerable distance down the way, and the wrong side of the wall. A surreal detail was the fizzing of a fire extinguisher, clipped by the car during its mad flight.

Eventually word came through that Viso was alive, and talking, and soon afterwards we learned that he was fundamentally fine - not even a broken bone. As in the case of Kubica, it took a bit of believing, but it was indeed the case. And perhaps even more miraculous was that every one of the marshals had escaped injury, too.

Not too long ago neither of these accidents would have been survivable, and they served as a timely caution against complacency. Yes, today's racing cars are strong beyond belief, and, yes, the HANS device has contributed immeasurably to the cause of safety, but - but - in the case of both Kubica and Viso, there was also a huge amount of luck involved.

Both were launched after wheel-to-wheel contact with a car in front, and probably accidents of this kind - while usually less dramatic than these two - are occasionally inevitable in 'open wheel' racing. But by the time Viso crashed on Saturday, there had already been an accident in the GP2 race, one which could have been avoided, had not the two drivers involved behaved idiotically.

After qualifying, iSport International team personnel were happy indeed, for their two drivers - Timo Glock and Andreas Zuber - were first and second. And had they used even a dash of commonsense, they could have been one-two in the race, too.

As it was, they collided with each other immediately after the lights went out, both cars plunging off to the left, one on top of the other. The whole incident looked so ridiculous that in the press room the initial reaction was to laugh at such utter stupidity - but the repercussions could have been anything but funny.

In helmets, as in other safety technologies, advances and improvements are always being made, and Glock will have been glad of that. The one he was wearing at Magny-Cours saved his life when Zuber's car crashed over his cockpit.

iSport International, while obviously relieved that the drivers had escaped without hurt, described the incident in a press release as, 'A farcical start - made infamous by Michael Schumacher'.

The sport's most successful driver was not the first to weave in the opening seconds of a race, away from the grid - Ayrton Senna, for one, did not hesitate to do it, particularly if his nemesis Alain Prost were alongside - but Schumacher it was who patented it, who made it standard practice.

Former US President Harry S Truman once observed of Richard Nixon, "If ever he caught himself telling the truth, he'd lie just to keep his hand in". Well, that's rather how Michael was in the opening seconds of a race: even if no one were threatening him, he'd jink around just to be sure, but if another driver made a better getaway, and presumed to try and pass him, he was utterly merciless - as his brother can tell you.

Time was when that sort of behaviour was frowned upon, considered 'not the done thing', and so on. In this era, however, 'sportsmanship' has become something almost to be derided - and there's another thing, too: as Stirling Moss has said, these days the drivers feel 'too safe', and that, in itself, is a mighty dangerous thing.

Recently, along with other journalists, I was invited to submit my list of the 10 greatest drivers, for publication in a forthcoming book. Several of my colleagues put Schumacher at number one, and if statistical success is your bible, the justification for doing that is unarguable.

But if you bring other things into the equation - including a driver's overall contribution to the sport, his legacy, if you like - the picture changes radically, I think. Michael just scraped into my top 10.

He - and Senna - would have been way higher on my list, had their behaviour not had such a disastrous effect on the ethics of motor racing as a whole. No one - least of all I - would suggest that Formula 1 should be other than a rugged activity, but it's quite possible to be hard yet fair, as people like Gilles Villeneuve and Mika Hakkinen demonstrated throughout their careers.

To swerve at another car - to intimidate its driver into backing off - is not fair, to my mind, and requires no skill whatever: anyone can do it, and these days, thanks to the example set by Schumacher, it has become almost de rigueur, the norm. More than that, it has become acceptable. While trivial incidents are constantly 'investigated', and drivers punished, a potentially lethal practice goes unnoticed, week after week.

Quite how this came to be, I'm not sure. It wasn't as though a day came when the FIA said, 'Okay, boys, it's now officially kosher to behave like lunatics'. Like everything else, I suppose, it just seeped in over time. Ayrton did it, and got away with it, and so did Michael, so why the hell not? Worked for them, so let's all do it...

The ironic backdrop to all this, of course, is that in all other respects there is a preoccupation, bordering on obsession, with safety in motor racing these days. Great corners - great circuits - have been either emasculated or eradicated altogether. New circuits have run-off areas the size of car parks. If it's raining at the start, the boys file in orderly fashion behind the safety car until it's deemed acceptable to go racing. And on and on.

It seems to me that the tacit acceptance of 'one move' - in other words, one chop/swerve in front of a car trying to overtake - was a very bad idea. For one thing, it sanctioned something previously considered unacceptable; for another, it was merely inevitable that one move should become two should become oh, what the hell...

I may not have many kind words for the IRL, but I greatly admire the stance taken on 'one move' in that series: it is absolutely not allowed, and retribution swiftly follows for any driver who tries it. In the case of a form of racing where the cars are routinely travelling well the wrong side of 200mph, that may be no more than commonsense, but I think it should apply everywhere. Apart from anything else, we would get a lot more of the overtaking we all so much miss.

What we saw at Magny-Cours on Saturday was perhaps the ultimate expression of foolishness in motor racing - perhaps it looked comical when Glock and Zuber took aim at each other, but the consequences could have been anything but: if I'd been their team manager, I'd have fired the pair of them.

If you think, at my late age, I'm turning all my beliefs upside down, and embracing the nanny state, you're very wide of the mark. But anyone who was at Monza in 1978, and saw the startline accident which cost the life of Ronnie Peterson, knows what can happen when people play silly games with highly dangerous toys. It's time the governing body included needless perils - and lack of sense - in its otherwise ceaseless safety drive.