50 years in the service of safety
06/29/2023
Nowadays, nobody is surprised when a "safety car" suddenly appears during a race and "catches" the field of vehicles because there is a safety problem of some kind, be it an accident or an intolerable rain shower.
This used to be different, of course. It was only in June 1973 at the Canadian Grand Prix that a safety car was used for the first time. It was a VW-Porsche 914, but the deployment went badly wrong, as the unhelmeted occupants of the Zuffenhausen sports car missed the front of the field and the outcome of the Grand Prix could only be decided at the green table. No wonder there was a break afterwards.
In the nineties, however, safety cars became a more familiar sight, regardless of whether it was a Ford Escort, an Opel Vectra, a Honda Prelude or, as above, a Mercedes-Benz C36 (picture above, 1996).
Over the years, the safety car drivers have obviously become more demanding, because today nothing seems to run under a veritable super sports car with an AMG or Aston Martin emblem.
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