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this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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It begs the question- could these drivers safely exit the car if they had a crash towards the end of these races? Were some of them already past a safe limit?
Watching Sargent bring the car in on the lap he eventually retired was shocking. He looked like someone struggling to function in the most basic sense, not like someone in control of their car.
After going back and watching his driver cam and listening to team radio calls around the time he went out (There may be more before this that I've missed) he definitely seems to be reeling from exhaustion-
Lap 40 Logan radios in to tell his engineer he doesn't feel well, and is almost immediately asked if he's retiring. There's some back and forth but he is ultimately told if he doesn't feel well he's retiring.
A couple corners in to lap 41 he radios back that he needs to stop. A few turns farther and he radios back that he needs to stop again and says he has no mirrors. From this point on he drives very erratically as he gets calls for where drivers are on track. At one point he's all the way down in 1st gear crawling so slowly that his engineer asks him repeatedly if he's ok and tells him to park the car.
As he enters the pits he tries and fails to open his visor, and later struggles to finally get it open. Before the camera feed cuts you can see him trying to get out of the car, stopping to gather himself, and ultimately being helped out by the mechanics.
I'm not a doctor but it would seem like a better solution is needed to decide if race conditions are safe if this is how things are going to be. F1 doesn't need to turn into a middle eastern blood sport.
They'd jump out like a rabbit with the adrenaline pumping through their bodies because of the risk of losing their life.
That's what we'd like to think, sure.
DC had commented during the F1TV coverage that he was surprised the drivers were feeling ill or much of anything besides adrenaline from racing so the conditions must've really been taking a toll. When an expert on the subject takes note of the extreme conditions that's a red flag to me that something may need a closer look.
Just hypothetically- If they're already peaked out just trying to keep themselves driving because the conditions make them ill, what kind of decision making would we see? To me, Logan looked like a driver in survival mode on the way back to the pits. If he drifts back into the racing line because he's blacking out or delirious from heat exhaustion, what capacity is he going to have to free himself from the car if someone were to collide with him?
It just seems logical to me that if the FiA are going to do things like the halo, survival cell, checking vertical oscillations for high G load, red flags for rain, etc, all in the name of driver safety, then maybe they will look into days like today before something tragic happens.
Adrenaline doesn’t overcome a body shutting down from heat exhaustion and definitely not from heat stroke.
Watching Logan, Alex, and Lance get out of their cars there’s no doubt in my mind they were suffering from heat exhaustion at minimum. I’ve suffered from it many times in my life and I know what it looks like, and this is it. It doesn’t matter how much you need to move, you’ve reached your limit and your body is actively shutting down because it simply can’t function at those temperatures and with that much fluid loss.