The dark decades
In the 1950s–70s, Formula One killed drivers at a rate that is difficult to comprehend today — often several per season across F1 and its feeder categories. Circuits had trees and houses for barriers; cars carried fuel tanks beside the driver; fire was the great terror.
Jackie Stewart's safety campaign — barriers, medical facilities, track standards — made him unpopular with organizers and immortal to everyone who raced after him.
The Senna watershed and after
Imola 1994 — Senna and Ratzenberger dying on consecutive days — triggered the modern safety revolution: the FIA Institute, crash-test regimes, higher cockpit sides, wheel tethers, the HANS device protecting the neck, and circuit redesigns replacing gravel and walls with asphalt runoff.
Twenty years of relentless iteration meant that when Robert Kubica hit a wall at 75g in Canada 2007, he missed one race. When Romain Grosjean's car split a barrier and burned in Bahrain 2020, the halo, survival cell and fireproofs let him walk out of the flames.
The halo and the modern toolkit
The halo — the titanium hoop over the cockpit, mandatory since 2018 — was initially mocked on aesthetic grounds. It has since been credited with saving multiple lives (Leclerc at Spa 2018, Grosjean 2020, Zhou at Silverstone 2022, Hamilton at Monza 2021). Nobody mocks it now.
Today's toolkit: the survival cell, halo, HANS, biometric gloves, accident data recorders, the Medical Car chasing lap one, extrication-trained marshals, and the VSC/safety-car protocols born from Bianchi's 2014 accident. Safety is now a design discipline equal to aerodynamics.