Call Yourself A Motorsport Fan?
With some big racing event going on over the weekend such as the Formula 1 in Valencia, the British Touring Cars at Croft and the British GT and F3 Championship at Brands Hatch, it was a good weekend for motorsport fans. However, my attention was bought to something that was not only disturbing, but concerned me greatly and made me question the mentality of some so called motorsport fans.
Whilst in the media room at Brands Hatch during some down time between races, I switched on the live streaming on the internet of the first BTCC race of the day at Croft. As I had the race on my laptop, my colleague had his laptop on running his live twitter feed. He, like me obviously follows a lot of racing fans on his twitter account so the feed was full of racing related tweets either about the F1 or the BTCC.
As the BTCC race got underway, there was a big collision on the start straight between a few cars causing terminal damage to at least two. Just after this, two tweets on the twitter feed to my right caught my attention. I was shocked and appalled. Both were very similar in content, and whist I can’t remember the exact wording of them, they went along the lines of ‘Wow, what a big accident. This is why I love BTCC and this is why it is the best racing series.’
Sadly it seems the accidents make motorsport exciting for some people.
Really? Is this some kind of joke? Do people really want to see big accidents in motorsport? Are these accidents what constitutes as a good racing series? More importantly, with this kind of mentality, can you really call yourself a motorsport fan?
Whilst I appreciate the close racing and contact nature of the BTCC can make it exciting to fans but do the fans want to see huge accidents that put people in danger? Yes, we all know motorsport can be dangerous but baying for accidents is just moronic. There have been a number of high profile deaths within motorsport recently and this is something surely no one wants to see, so to have fans wanting and getting excited by accidents is deeply disturbing. Thankfully the majority of drivers do walk away from big impacts unscathed, but not everyone is that lucky. My last blog touched on the fact that the mainstream media only reported on Le Mans due to Anthony Davidson’s huge crash in which he suffered some potentially career threatening injuries. But maybe the media realise that this is what people want to hear about. I sincerely hope this is not the case.
Thankfully most drivers walk away unscathed from accidents. Some arent so lucky though.
I’m pretty sure that If I went for a day out with a friend or family member and before leaving I turned and said to them ‘I really hope we have a big accident on the way, it would really make things more exciting’ they would think twice about getting in a car with me and would probably try to get me sectioned under the mental health act. So is it really acceptable to have this mentality when it comes to not only motorsport but any kind of sport?
Racing doesn’t need to have accidents to make it exciting. The British GT race at Brands Hatch proves this and I will be writing about that later in the week. So if you are one of these people who disagrees with this, then may I suggest you take a good look at yourself and stop calling yourself a motorsport fan. Failing that, put down the moonshine and look for another interest. I hear skydiving without a parachute is pretty exhilarating.
