21/07/2014
NEWS STORY
An incident during yesterday's German Grand Prix reminded Lewis Hamilton of 1977 race tragedy.
Speaking in the wake of yesterday's Grand Prix, Hamilton, who drove a storming race to third, having started from twentieth on the grid, admitted that the incident when marshals had to recover Adrian Sutil's stranded Sauber from the pit straight brought back bad memories.
Whilst it was initially thought the race might be red-flagged in order to recover the stricken car, instead double yellows were waved, a trio of marshals eventually running on to the track to push the car to safety.
As he passed the scene, Hamilton recalled a tragedy he had witnessed on video many years earlier.
"I used to work at a driving school in Bedford," he told Reuters, "and one day I came in and they had this video that was playing all the time. It was a video from a race from years and years ago and a car had stopped on the track, a marshal ran across the track and got hit by a car coming past. That was the first thing I thought about.
"Obviously we are not going as fast as on that straight but I was worried about the marshals," he added. "Fortunately no one got hurt. When you come around that corner at serious speed, and then there are marshals standing not far away from where you are driving past. For me that's the closest it's been for a long, long time."
The incident to which Hamilton was referring was the 1977 South African Grand Prix, when the unsighted Tom Pryce struck a marshal, 19-year-old Frederik Jansen van Vuuren, who was running to the air of another driver (Renzo Zorzi) whose car had caught fire.
Fans looked on in horror as the Welshman's Shadow ran over the youngster and the fire extinguisher he had been carrying hit the driver on the head, both men dying at the scene.
Pryce was widely regarded as the greatest Welshman ever to race a Grand Prix car, combining natural speed with sensational car control that invited comparisons with legends such as Jochen Rindt and Ronnie Peterson. He is best remembered for being the only Welshman to have win a Formula One race, the Race of Champions at Brands Hatch in 1975.
Ironically, the winner of the race - not that many remember, such was the feeling of loss, anger and frustration - was Niki Lauda, Hamilton's boss at Mercedes.