Dead on the Track Trivia Quiz

Answer: Luigi Musso

Born in 1924, Musso was active in Formula One from 1953 until his untimely death in 1958. After a good 1957 season that saw him in third place for the World Championship, he began the 1958 season even more auspiciously with two second places. However on lap 10 of the fifth race, he crashed out of a tricky curve and his car flipped in the air.

He was rescued alive but died later that day in hospital. The death of amateur driver Alborghetti in his very first race preceded this fatal accident by three years, but the Pau Grand Prix was not a championship race. Both other drivers, Castellotti and Cabianca, died during tests.

Answer: Wolfgang Berghe von Trips

On starting the Italian Grand Prix, von Trips needed a third place to secure the championship. However, fate proved to be cruel - on the very first lap, his car went off the track after a collision with Jim Clark, not only killing him but fifteen spectators as well.

In spite of the disaster, the race was not stopped and American Phil Hill won, securing the championship by one point. Trips never won the World Championship, but he founded a Kart track in the German town of Kerpen which would later, under new ownership, become the location where a German boy by the name of Michael Schumacher was to learn the basics of motor racing - we all know what became of him.

Answer: Nürburgring (Germany)

The dubious honor of being the most lethal track goes to the old Nürburgring - a 22 kilometer winding road through many forested sections dubbed "green hell". Beyond the five deaths, Nürburgring was responsible for countless severe injuries and hardly a year passed without a serious crash.

A reconstruction in the early 1970s took out some of the worst hazards and the track was used for six more races until Niki Lauda's near-fatal 1976 accident that left him severely burnt. Today's Nürburgring is a newly built track opened 1984 that bears no resemblance in layout or character to the old one. In spite of its many spectacular accidents and utter lack of any buffer zones, the Monte Carlo circuit has claimed only one driver's life.

Answer: A wheel of his own car

Safety standards in the 1970s were much lower than they are in today's races and cars crashing often literally disintegrated. This also happened in Mr. Courage's crash - a front wheel of the car broke off during impact and the trajectory was so unfortunate that it hit the driver's head. Even without this impact, however, it would have been dubious whether Piers Courage could have survived as magnesium parts used in the car's construction caught fire.

Answer: Jochen Rindt

After winning five of the first ten races of the ill-fated 1970 season, Rindt was clearly on track to win the championship. The Italian Grand Prix of the year was held at the very fast Monza circuit and Rindt used an extremely aggressive, fast gear ratio and a low-drag setup to maximize top speed - a contributing factor to the intensity of the extreme speed crash caused by a mechanical failure in the car's braking system and compounded by a flaw in the safety barriers.

In the remaining four races, no other driver could catch Rindt's point lead, also due to the efforts of his team's replacement driver Emerson Fittipaldi (a later World Champion himself) who, with his first Formula One victory, ensured that Rindt's lead would last to the end of the season.

Answer: Ronnie Peterson

Peterson's death was doubly tragic because directly after the crash, he did not seem to have life-threatening injuries. He was rescued alive and conscious from his blazing car with severe leg trauma and mild burns, but most medical attention was given to Vittorio Brambilla, who was comatose. Peterson suffered a total of ten leg fractures which were surgically treated, but the extent of the injuries caused an undetected fat embolism which led to his death the day after the race. Brambilla fully recovered from his injuries.

Answer: Gilles Villeneuve

A fatal misunderstanding during a qualifying lap proved to spell doom for Canadian hero Gilles Villeneuve. On a fast lap, he ran up to the car of Jochen Maass who was on a slower lap. Villeneuve attempted to pass Maass on the less advantageous side, probably not sure whether the slower driver had seen him. Maass, however, had noticed Villeneuve and, attempting to move off the ideal trajectory, he steered right in front of Villeneuve's car which vaulted into the air and disintegrated upon impact. Villeneuve was flung from the wreckage and died from severe neck trauma.

Answer: Riccardo Paletti

Just one month and five days after the death of Gilles Villeneuve, the owners of the Montréal track (then named Île Notre-Dame Circuit) decided to rename it after the famous driver from Quebec. The dedication ceremony took place prior to the 1982 Canadian Grand Prix but proved to be a jinx as in the very first seconds of the race, pole position driver Pironi from France stalled his car. Several drivers had minor collisions with the standing vehicle but it was Paletti who, starting from one of the last places, directly hit it at over 180 kph.

He sustained severe chest injuries and his car caught fire which proved to be very difficult to extinguish. The combination of the extinguishing materials with his already difficult breathing from the injury proved fatal for the Italian.

Answer: United Kingdom

The two unfortunate drivers were Chris Bristow, a rookie on his fourth race and Alan Stacey, a young man who drove Formula One cars in spite of having an artificial leg. Both drivers crashed in the devious Burnenville corner (which also had seen British racing legend Stirling Moss crash in qualifying the day before) and both deaths were rather unusual - Bristow was killed by injuries from barbed wire after the crash and and Stacey's crash was caused by a bird striking his face. With two deaths and two very severe injuries, this race weekend had the then worst toll from the drivers.

Answer: Ayrton Senna

In a twist of irony, Senna's fatal crash occurred just hours after the previous day's fatal accident led to the re-founding of the Formula One's drivers' association, a body to which Senna had been named one of three directors. This committee had been invoked to initiate further safety improvements in the sport after it had seen its first driver death in eight years.

It however came too late for defending World Champion Senna who, after suffering a broken steering column on his car, also hit a concrete wall at over 210 kph (130 mph) and succumbed to massive head trauma in hospital, several hours after the race.

His death was to remain the last fatal driver injury in Formula One for at least 18 years - a sharp contrast to the years up to 1980 where hardly a year passed without at least one driver losing his life during the pursuit of his chosen sport.