Toto Wolff has advocated for the FIA and the F1 teams to look at amending the regulations to prevent incidents similar to Oliver Bearman’s scary Japanese Grand Prix crash from happening in the future.
The British driver slammed into the barriers at Suzuka side-on after narrowly missing Franco Colapinto ahead, who suffered a sudden, drastic loss of speed.
That offset caught Bearman by surprise, and is something that numerous drivers had warned would happen eventually if the regulations were not altered to prevent dramatic closing speed differentials.
Thankfully, there was no contact between the two cars, but the FIA, F1 and its drivers may not be as lucky next time.
The new rules — and the safety concerns surrounding them — were already proving contentious before the Haas driver’s high-speed shunt, but the general consensus in the aftermath of the accident is that the motorsport governing body must act.
Reviews of the regulations were already planned for the now-five-week break before the Miami Grand Prix, but the focus was expected to be on qualifying.
However, in the wake of the Bearman incident, safety will surely be high up on the agenda, which is something Wolff welcomes.
“Yeah, this is something which we need to look at, clearly,” the Mercedes team principal told media, including RacingNews365.
“We don’t want this to happen,” he added before highlighting that the rules are not yet mature, given they are only three rounds old: “[The] regulations, are they in a very immature way?
“And I’m sure the FIA and us teams, we’re going to analyse the accident very carefully to see how we can avoid these things.”
The Austrian does not believe there is an obvious solution to prevent such dangerous overspeeds. When asked, he replied: “No, but I’m sure there are more competent people than me already in Mercedes scratching their heads [over] how to avoid that.”
