Talk Steer: Tony Dodgins on...

All clear! Kovalainen with medical car driver Jacques Tropenat and FIA medical delegate Jean-Charles Piette

The images of Heikki Kovalainen from Istanbul were altogether more satisfactory than those from Barcelona. Heikki is one of the most well-adjusted guys in the paddock, and it was great that he was able to pass his medical tests, start from the front row for the first time and show the kind of pace that, with a bit more luck, might actually have won him the Turkish Grand Prix.

Just a fortnight earlier we saw very worrying pictures of a McLaren buried in a tyre barrier and a driver sitting there with a pile of tyres on his head.

Forty years after we put a man on the moon, you could ask the question whether grand prix drivers really should be shunting into piles of tyres? In what is trumpeted as the most technically advanced sport in the world, surely it ought to be a tad more sophisticated than that?

Perhaps we have an answer "Yeah," Mark Webber mused in Turkey, "tyres are very economical, and in terms of bang for buck they're pretty good. But you do wonder what we might have in 20 years time..."

Well perhaps we already have an answer. At Monza in 2006, the FIA introduced a new High Speed Barrier, developed by the FIA Institute following a programme of development with German automotive safety group DEKRA and French company Tekpro. It was installed at the second chicane and Parabolica, both places with high-speed approaches and limited run-off.

The introduction of the barrier was overshadowed somewhat on the weekend when the Grand Prix Drivers Association (GPDA) went public in expressing its concerns about general safety at the track.

Work on the High Speed Barrier is ongoing, which is why it has not seen a rapid introduction around the world's circuits. You could ask why it has not appeared, but the simple answer is that accident investigation work is not the work of a moment - especially because a barrier that is good for one type of crash at a corner is not necessarily right for another type of accident.

Vulnerable to head-on impacts Cars are now fitted with data recorders, so we have facts about the forces involved. We know, for instance, that Kovalainen lost control at 260km/h and hit the tyres at 135km/h. We know he was subjected to a 27g deceleration, which was actually quite mild in accident terms.

We know, too, that angle of impact is important and that the FIA uses a computer CSAS (Circuit Simulation And Safety) programme to analyse and predict run-off.

But, equally, the work of the FIA Institute has highlighted the fact that tyre barriers are vulnerable to head-on impacts. They know that because they have crashed trolleys with noses attached into conveyor- belted, bolted tyre barriers and noted the ease with which they are penetrated.

Webber again: "You look at Luciano Burti's Spa accident [in 2001] and there has to be a point where more tyres are maybe not the right thing to do. From what I heard about that, the pressure on his helmet was really intense. His head had nowhere to go and was pushed against the headrest. We absolutely need to look into that.

"Then there was Gonzalo Rodriguez's [fatal] Champ Car shunt at Laguna Seca , where there was only a couple [of rows] and then he went over [the barrier]. If Heikki had had just two rows, you don't want that, so was it a blessing that he went in a bit deeper? It's a difficult one."

As Kovalainen himself admitted, it's not a simple subject. If he had hit something more solid head-on, he might have emerged without a head injury but with serious lower body damage.

A sigh of relief And you cannot ignore the fact that improved car safety is also playing its role. At the risk of being derided as a self- appointed expert, there was an element of good fortune in Kovalainen's Barcelona escape, in that the cockpit side protection that was made compulsory after the Coulthard/ Wurz Melbourne shunt last year may have coincidentally saved Kovalainen from more serious injury in a frontal impact. "Good on the FIA for pushing that through so quickly," Webber acknowledges.

Formula 1 breathed a sigh of relief after Kovalainen's escape in Spain, but it is clear that the work will never stop on making the tracks, as well as the cars, safe.