The road incident with the Renault truck driver opened an area of F1 which often gets overlooked but teams state that they pay as much attention on them too.
Between the F1 German GP and Hungarian GP, a Renault truck driver met with an accident on a highway in Hungary. The French manufacturer stated that the driver was back home without any major injuries.
With the growing F1 calendar, the toll one teams and its members is only increasing but they clarify that they are doing as much to not burden them with work, which may result in mishaps that can cost one’s life even.
Speaking about their efforts, Alfa Romeo Racing’s Beat Zehnder said: “As a team you are well prepared for back-to-backs and all the other European races you normally have external truck drivers, or truck drivers, team truck drivers who have rested on the Sunday and only drive when they’re supposed to.
“You don’t have team members like twenty years ago who worked the whole day and then in the evening jumped in the truck and then drove to the next event, so everything is safe and sound and accidents like this can happen. I think we’re moving more than 400 lorries from one event to the next and considering that, there are not a lot of accidents happening.”
Williams’ Claire Williams agreed with her counterpart, adding that the teams comply with the regulation of driving hours for each member, but admits such incidents do not bode well for them.
She found support from McLaren’s Andreas Seidl, with Ferrari’s Mattia Binotto stating: “The picture is very similar for all the teams. The drivers are not people that are working throughout the weekend, especially not at a back-to-back.
“Certainly we as team principals of teams are taking care of our people, making sure that what they are doing at the tracks or driving, we are always doing that in a safe manner with the proper way of applying things, let me say.
“But what happened is to be considered serious, no doubt, and whatever is happening, as a team, we have the responsibility to review what happened and there is a necessity to try eventually to improve. I don’t have the details in that case but as Ferrari we would certainly consider if we can even do better in the future.”
On Red Bull Racing’s side, Christian Horner added: “It’s a big challenge getting all the equipment, the cars, the engineering centre, in our case the Energy Station – I think we’re in excess of 40 trucks to get to an event and when you’ve got a back-to-back event, that’s an added pressure, that they’ve got to be here really by Tuesday afternoon.
“So, it’s another thing to take into consideration, with the logistics of an increased calendar is not putting too much tension on the movement of parts and people from one venue to another. Unfortunately accidents do happen and I think the most important things are you try and mitigate that as best you can.
“With contract drivers it’s not like the old days when the truckies – well, the truckies don’t drive trucks any more. I don’t know why they’re still called truckies. In fact I think we’ve only got one truck driver who can drive a truck. Everybody has contractors that specifically are here just to move the vehicles around.”
