Sergio Perez says he hopes the decision to introduce Halo is vindicated in the future.
The Force India driver said he still isn’t sold on the aesthetics of the safety device but believes the FIA deserves “total respect” for introducing it.
“They really compromised the look of it but they’re worried about the safety and that’s something that will go along the junior categories as well which is quite good,” he said. “So hat off for the FIA.”
“I hope in the coming years Halo saves a couple of lives, we have a couple of incidents where the Halo does play a big gain and then we will all be sitting here saying the FIA took the right decision.”
“I obviously don’t like the look of it,” he told RaceFans at the Circuit de Catalunya, “But the encouragement that I get from the safety point, the lives that we could have saved in the past, that’s a strong argument to be made for the halo and I’m sure that in a couple of races we will not talk about it.”
Perez said Halo does make it “more difficult” to get out of the cockpit but said it adds “just a couple of seconds” to the cockpit exit time. “I think it’s more crucial if you get a tyre on your head than a couple of seconds jumping out of the car.”
IndyCar has tested an alternative structure called the windscreen but Perez is not convinced it is as strong as the Halo is.
“I remember a couple of things the FIA tried in the past, they were better-looking but they were not as safe as the Halo,” he said. “I think the FIA did a really deep analysis and I think what’s the best compromise, they got. I believe they will keep work on it and who knows, maybe in the coming years that might change.”
“Formula One has done a massive step in how safety has developed throughout the years,” he added. “But being at the pinnacle at the sport together with the co-operation of the FIA, how productive they’ve been, with us we felt that the Halo’s what’s needed.”
“And the main reason is to look back in the past years, we would have saved a couple of lives. And that’s a very strong argument.”
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MrBoerns (@mrboerns)
26th February 2018, 17:42
All i see is “Perez hopes for extremely nasty crash that would surely have been fatal Last years”
hahostolze (@hahostolze)
26th February 2018, 17:54
Yeah, I was gonna say, maybe it’s a bit of an easy shot, maybe it’s just semantics, but I hope that the halo never proves it was needed.
Lancer033 (@lancer033)
27th February 2018, 2:25
i’m sure it was just a poor choice of wording, not something intentional. Accidents are always going to happen, so from that way of looking at it, you could read his quote to mean that he hopes the Halo works when the time comes.
MacLeod (@macleod)
26th February 2018, 17:46
They should make an hybride the halo but without the middle piece repalve that with an windscreen like the indi.
Michael Brown (@)
26th February 2018, 21:28
I wish it could be made of clear material. I doubt anything that strong exists in the world.
Neil (@neilosjames)
26th February 2018, 18:08
Hm. I’d rather it never had to save anyone.
Hugh (@hugh11)
26th February 2018, 18:30
‘Perez hopes Halo proves its worth by saving lives’
in other words
‘Perez hopes there’s a ginormous crash that could’ve been fatal last year and would probably still injure the driver’
StephenH
26th February 2018, 18:31
And hopefully he’ll praise the IndyCar shield when it deflects a price of debris small enough to get through the gap in the Halo …
Big Joe
26th February 2018, 20:01
ok I`ll go one better.
`Perez hopes they bring diggers on to the track or operate cars around trucks with tail lifts at head height to show tough tough the Halo is`
The biggest problem with Halo is going to be the speculation in the media and forum arguments the next time a car goes on top of another or rolls over. which F1 cars have dealt with very well the last few decades and not been the cause of deaths
MrBoerns (@mrboerns)
26th February 2018, 20:14
Thats a given. The first time a halo touches anything at all it will have ‘saved lives’.
Alianora La Canta (@alianora-la-canta)
26th February 2018, 21:21
In fairness, Sergio said “in the coming years”. Statistically there’s bound to be something that tests the Halo (in a big or small way) eventually. Let’s hope it’s a really long time before it’s tested, and that Halo proves Sergio right and me wrong :)
Michael (@freelittlebirds)
26th February 2018, 23:55
I’m actually offended by the drivers becoming such firm supporters of the halo. It’s almost as if they feel that F1 is not safe. It’s darn safe. Do you know who should be complaining? Billy Monger, not Perez or Alonso…
I’m not going to argue why but how many of you feel that Perez is taking a higher risk driving his F1 car than any of you driving your car at 150 miles per hour on an empty highway? I’m not going to say through traffic cause then you are 1,000 times higher risk.
If Alonso or Perez feel that F1 is unsafe, let’s see him do skeleton or ski jumping at the winter Olympics. He’ll be asking for a carbon-fiber suit with 20 HANS devices and 200 million dollars to do a single run….
PK
27th February 2018, 0:20
@freelittlebirds
Totally agree. It’s hard to view the drivers as heroes when they are hiding behind their little cages and I am taking more risk riding my motorcycle to work …. and what’s worse is that I was taking more risk BEFORE this monstrosity was tacked onto the cars.
#NoHalo
Robbie (@robbie)
27th February 2018, 15:31
@freelittlebirds @PK All the drivers have felt quite safe for years now in F1. And you’ve been watching. It has been years now that one could say it is more dangerous driving your motorcycle to work, crossing the street, doing recreational skiing etc etc. Perez and Alonso aren’t ‘complaining’. They’re just giving their opinion, and dealing with the reality that they now have a halo on their car, and they are tired of hearing about it.
But go ahead and dump on the drivers now. If they had a say the halo would likely not be there. They have not had a say other than to just deal with it. And it sounds like aside from the aesthetics, dealing with it is easy. Personally I think the halo will not make one bit of difference to the actual racing, so unless you were watching just to see someone hurt, which I know is not the case, then does it really matter if there is something now that might save them in a lightning strike kind of odds of an accident?
If you need F1 to be more dangerous than the Olympics, or going to work on your motorbike, then write the FIA and request they wind the clock back to 60’s and 70’s level of safety. Perhaps you can convince them to go back to making cars out of aluminum.
Really though, I do get your point(s) that F1 is safe enough, and was before the halo. I really do get that. The cars have only had to meet harder and harder crash test requirements, the tracks have been given huge runoffs, we have vsc’s that should eliminate another Bianchi type tragedy, and yet they also wanted to add a halo after seeing a few drivers die from being hit by large debris in recent years in open cockpit cars. And the series where that happened is now testing an aeroscreen. Nascar went Hans devices and safer barriers and are very very safe now too, and that’s with them having more crashes than all other series combined probably.
I can’t explain why racing series have decided they need to be safer than walking across the street, especially with all the Extreme sports out there…many of them sponsored by Red Bull. People lined up to do Everest. People jumping off cliffs in wing suits. There’s no shortage of people looking for maximum risk and thrills.
For me, I’m content that in F1 the ‘danger’ is, and has been for years, touching another car especially one’s teammate’s, or overcooking it and flat spotting a tire, or getting beat by your teammate, being coloured by a poor car etc etc.
PK
27th February 2018, 23:43
@Robbie
Reasonable reply. To your points:
– If the drivers would take a stand against the Halo (if they feel that way of course) then I think people would at least feel that they aren’t complacent in this. We understand that they don’t have a say.
– I don’t want 70’s levels of safety…2017 would do just fine.
– For me (and a lot of people I think) danger is an important element of motorsports. The drivers perform amazing feats of skill in the face of their own fear. I don’t have the skill or the bravery and so I respect what they do. What they do is “heroic” …. in a sporting sense. While intellectually I know that F1 has been safe for many years I can still feel the danger viscerally. This feeling is lost when staring at the Halo. This is the source of the reaction against it I think.
The other thing is that the cars are supposed to be aspirational, objects of engineering beauty, object of design perfection, the embodiment of performance….these 2018 cars don’t make people feel this way. But for me the main issue isn’t aesthetics (there have been plenty of ugly cars in the past).
#NoHalo