As far as I know, this is the first fuel fire from an accident in F1 since Gerhard Berger went off at Tamburello in Imola in 1989. (I'm not counting oil fires or small fries from blown engines, I'm talking about spilled fuel from a car crashing.) Before that I
think you have to go to Monza in 1978, Ronnie Peterson's Lotus.
They had fuel cells in Berger's day, and carbon fiber monocoques, but the fuel cells were still allowed to be carried in the sides of the car. Moving the fuel cell to the space behind the driver was a direct result of that incident, and like I said, as far as I know this is the first fuel fire in a crash since that time. (No, the Benetton pit fire doesn't count; that wasn't a crash!!
)
Everyone's talking about how this never should have happened, the car can't be allowed to break that way, the fuel cell should never have been penetrated, the barriers were just stupid, but everyone needs to calm down a minute.
As for the barriers, how are they different from what lines the
entire circuit at Monaco? As for the angle of the barriers, every race track in the Universe has angled barriers protecting service roads, roads where vehicles such as tractors and cranes will need access to the track. The barrier
has to angle out to keep the end of the other barrier from presenting an abutment to the track. Also, the barrier is nearly halfway down a long straight, where no out-of-control cars are expected. Still, tire barriers with a conveyor-belt cover seems reasonable. Thing is, tire barriers aren't best with glancing impacts, the kind you'd expect on a straightaway; they work best for the mostly head-on event like this ended up being. A car hitting a tire barrier at an angle can get buried in the tires and suffer a harder stop than simply sliding along a steel barrier. (Still not as hard a stop as this one was!)
As for the car breaking in half, there was speculation earlier in the thread about a basic design defect. Ever since 1967's Lotus 49, the rear of the car has used the engine as its structure. The engine bolts to the back of the car, and the engine carries
everything that lives back there: suspension, transmission, rear wing, all of it. This accident was not
exactly head-on into the barrier, although very close; there was a vector down the track that wrenched the back of the car along the barrier, obvious from where it ended up after the accident. That wrenching is also what turned the front of the car pointing back down the reverse direction of the track. The mass of the engine was simply too much for the fitments to bear when the tub stopped in the barrier. the engine broke off and continued a few meters. The alternative to bolting the stressed-member engine to the back of the car is to build a tub, like the driver's cell, and put the engine in there. It still has to carry a
lot more weight than a driver, and would still be subjected to massive shearing forces in an accident like this one, and that shearing force would act on the driver cell rather than being removed from it altogether.
We don't know, and may never know, how much fuel was actually spilled. They reported that "smarter minds than ours" were saying it was simply the collector, between the fuel cell and the engine, that was ruptured. Others said that was still too big a fire to come from the couple of liters of fuel that the collector apparently holds. (I personally don't know what the collector actually is, or its volume.) Whether the actual main fuel cell was ruptured is still not verified publicly. I am of a mind that agrees with those saying if they main cell had spilled the fire would have been even more monstrous than it was, perhaps almost an order of magnitude, but I still think it was too much for a couple of liters to account for. It's all speculation for us at this point. The teams and the FIA will put their best people onto looking at that car, to find where the fuel came from and how much of it there was.
So the accident was "the perfect storm" of F1 accidents. It happened along a straightaway, where accidents rarely happen. The car was nearly head-on into the barrier, which was built anticipating glancing impacts. The nose of the car speared between rows of the steel, which no other part of the car would have done. But as bad as it was, it absolutely demonstrates how far cars and crews have come in the modern Formula One organization. That driver cell was cracked but intact, all the way down to the foot box, although
nothing remained ahead of that; The halo was intact, the roll hoop was intact. The medical car was there within seconds, and Grosjean was already extricating himself, they didn't have to go in after him. (Think about getting out... release the belts, throw away the steering wheel, get rid of the headrest piece, find the space between the halo and the barrier and squeeze up through that, with fuel burning underneath and all around.) The marshal behind the barrier was headed back to the car just as quickly as he saw his own danger had passed, although he wasted a bit of his extinguisher triggering it on the way in. The response of the FIA people was absolutely amazing! Having done corner working myself at Barber Motorports Park, I just can't imagine our crew's response to such an incident!
