Sports Then and Now

Former F1 pilot Hans Stuck is credited with one of the most memorable quotes in autodom.

“When I raced a car last,” Stuck proclaims, “it was a time when sex was safe and racing was dangerous, now it’s the other way around.”

Social commentary aside, Stuck is right. The advances made in safety for racing drivers over the last half-century have reduced the sports mortality rate by orders of magnitude, and even allowed drivers to walk away from crashes that at one time would most certainly have been fatal.

Even now, engineers and medical experts work tirelessly to continue to improve the safety record of a sport that is inherently dangerous. Let’s take a look back at how things came so far.

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2008 Champion, Lewis Hamilton, holds solid claims of regaining the F1 Drivers Championship in 2011

Lewis Hamilton begins his fifth season driving for the F1 McLaren team in March hoping that he can improve upon his fourth place in the world driver’s championship achieved in 2010.

Hamilton won the Driver’s Championship in 2008, in what was only his second ever season as a driver at the top level of the sport, finishing a single point clear of Felipe Massa driving for Ferrari. It was a magnificent effort made even more special due to the fact that he was only 24 years old, the youngest ever winner of the world championship! It should also be remembered that the year before was his F1 debut season where he finished in second place just a single point behind Kimi Raikonnen of Ferrari.

To date Hamilton has won 14 F1 Grand Prix’s on eleven different circuits and has had 36 podium finishes. He holds a number of records including:

• The most consecutive podium finishes – 9

• Most wins in a debut season (2007) – 4

• Most Pole positions in a debut season (2007) – 6

• Most points in a debut season – 109 (points system now changed)

In his four years on the Formula One circuit, he has finished 2^nd, 1^st, 5^th and 4^th and has only retired from seven races in 71 starts, although he was disqualified in the 2009 Australian GP.

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