Formula One's Tire Fiasco Recalls the Sport's Sometimes Lethal Past SILVERSTONE, England - In the hours after the British Grand Prix had run its striking and unnerving course on Sunday, punctuated by a succession of high-speed, rear tire explosions that threw great chunks of disintegrated rubber and shards of splintered carbon fiber into the path of pursuing racecars traveling at speeds of up to 185 miles an hour, the anxious talk in the paddock seemed like an eerie throwback to another era in Formula One. Drivers, engineers and team managers, principals of a sport that has moved a long way since the days, decades ago, when death in the afternoon was its grim and familiar coda, were huddled around the Silverstone paddock, in and out of the giant, fold-out, steel-and-glass palaces that serve as transportable headquarters and entertaining centers for the competing teams. Their insistent topic, for the first time in years, was of the forbidding risks inherent in the sport: the risks of drivers being killed, or, still worse, of accidents in which spectators, too, could be fatalities - and of the potentially catastrophic effect that might have on the survival of the sport itself. It is nearly 20 years since the grim afternoon in May 1994, when Formula One suffered its last on-track fatality, that of a three-time world champion, the Brazilian Ayrton Senna, who died when his Renault-powered Williams car left the track at over 190 miles an hour in what was then grand prix racing's fastest corner, the Tamburello sweep on the Imola circuit in Italy. That accident, and one the previous afternoon that killed an Austrian driver, Roland Ratzenberger, shook the sport. In the years that followed, tough new standards in the design of the cars, the tracks and the protective equipment for the drivers made Formula One, improbably, less dangerous by a wide margin, in terms of fatalities, than equestrianism, mountaineering and boxing, to name only a few other high-risk sports. On the morning after the Silverstone race, headlines in Britain's newspapers made a sensation of what had happened. The race was won, for the first time since 1955, by one of the Silver Arrow cars entered by the Mercedes-Benz team, piloted this time by Nico Rosberg, the 28-year-old German-Finnish competitor who also took his Mercedes to victory in the season's anchor event, the Monaco Grand Prix in May. In a race that featured just the sort of flag-to-flag, close-quarters racing and hairbreadth overtaking that the sport has too often lacked in the processional racing of recent years, Rosberg won by a margin of less than 0.8 seconds over the Renault-powered Red Bull of the Australian, Mark Webber, with the Ferrari of Spain's Fernando Alonso a further six seconds back. For the last 10 laps, and more, any one of at least five drivers had seemed like a potential winner, the sort of contest that Nascar racing regularly delivers to its American followers. But it was not the edge-of-your-seat racing, the halcyon blue-sky weather so rare in recent British summers, or the big crowds - close to 300,000 spectators over the three-day event, with 120,000 on Sunday - that generated banner headlines. "Terror Tyres," proclaimed the mass-circulation Daily Mail, with an inside story headlined "Out of Control." "It's like Russian roulette, says Webber," was The Daily Telegraph's banner. "Road to hell," said the normally staid Times of London. "Wheels coming off: Drivers consider boycott over safety fears," echoed The Guardian. Listening to the anguished talk in the paddock provided, for this reporter, an unexpected, and sobering, back-to-the-future moment. For me, Silverstone will be forever associated with the sunwashed day in July 1958 when, as a teenage schoolboy on the loose from Stowe School, two and a half miles across the fields from the Silverstone corner that carries the school's name, I burrowed under the fencing surrounding the track and made my way, eluding what little security there then was, to the pit-paddock area. There, I watched my boyhood hero, the Englishman Peter Collins, his face wreathed in oil and rubber dust, celebrate a start-to-finish victory in the British Grand Prix for Ferrari, averaging over 102 m.p.h. on what was then little more than a track put together from the perimeter taxiways of a World War II bomber airfield. Two weeks later, I badgered my father, a NATO air force officer, to take the whole family camping to the Nürburgring in Germany, in the hope of seeing Collins repeat his win in the German Grand Prix. But on the 11th of 15 laps around the forbidding, 14.2-mile track through the Eifel mountains, Collins's No. 2 car failed to appear, having somersaulted off the track while challenging for the lead of the race with another Englishman, Tony Brooks, who went on to win the race in his Vanwall. We saw the wreckage of Collins's Ferrari returned on a flatbed to the paddock area, and the bloodied aero-screen and twisted steering wheel suggested what we heard confirmed later that night, sitting in stunned silence in the family car beside our tent, in the lead item on the BBC radio news: Peter Collins, tousle-haired and seemingly always smiling, had suffered fatal head and neck injuries in the crash, and had died. At Silverstone this weekend, I carried with me copies of the Autosport magazines, yellowing now, that told the story of those two long-ago weekends. In the magazine's account of the Silverstone race, I found my own penciled tick-marks, made years later, against the names of eight drivers, out of the 20 who started the race, who were later killed on the racetracks of Europe, all but one of them within four years. It was a toll that became an ineluctable part of grand prix racing for many years afterward, as it had been for many years before, and the experience of Collins's death, and the seeming cruelty of it, remained with me mournfully over the years as my career as a foreign correspondent carried me to other distant fields where war, and the ravages of nature, made sudden death an inescapable companion. That death, or the risk of it, became a palpable thing again so quickly at Silverstone more than half a century later was the major surprise of the weekend. But with 24 hours to reflect on it, I suspect that the tire explosions, and the crisis they have forced on Formula One, may have provided a jolt that the sport, after years in which it has grown accustomed to levels of safety that were once unimaginable, may have needed. Modern technology, in the form of carbon fiber chassis with deformable structures, sealed fuel cells, wide high-adhesion tires, fireproof driver's suits and head-and-neck restraints, as well as generous runoff areas and forgiving tire barriers, have given drivers levels of protection unthought-of in Collins's time. In an era before seat belts or rollover bars were widespread, drivers died of burns from exploding fuel tanks, or from relatively low-speed impacts and rollovers. But for all the innovations, the potential for disaster has never wholly receded. The cars that compete now are, as the aerodynamicists who dominate in their design often say, like aircraft turned upside down, subject to enormous downforce that glues them to the track. When those forces are unbound - say, when a collision lifts the front into the air - Formula One cars become airplanes and can fly hundreds of yards, sometimes 50 feet or more into the air, a height at which they could potentially clear the catch fences that guard spectator areas. And the speeds at which this can happen are vastly greater than in Collins's time. Just one measure of that is that the pole position lap for this year's race, at a speed of close to 145 m.p.h., was nearly 40 percent faster than Stirling Moss's pole position in 1958 - and that on a significantly slower configuration of the Silverstone track than the one used 55 years ago. Yet how rarely drivers think about the hazards was suggested at Silverstone when Lewis Hamilton, the Englishman who is Rosberg's teammate at Mercedes, and who was the first of five drivers to suffer an explosion of the left rear tire, in his case when he was the early race leader from pole position, said after the race that the incident marked "the first time in my career that I've felt the danger." "You become a passenger when the tire goes," he said. Then, voicing a frustration with the sport's authorities and their perceived indifference to the risks that was common among the drivers after the Silverstone race, he added, "It's only when someone gets hurt that someone will do something about it." Other drivers were prompted by the tire failures to speak more bluntly than before on the sport's inherent dangers, a subject that has been, in Formula One as in other forms of motor sport, almost taboo among competitors, as if talking about death might invite the reaper to approach. Felipe Massa, the Brazilian Ferrari driver who was another to experience a left rear tire explosion, told visitors to the Ferrari motor home that he had felt himself to be "in the hands of God" when his tire blew. "What happened today was very dangerous, and not only or me, for all of us" he said. Sergio Pérez, a Mexican driver for McLaren, also a victim of a high-speed tire loss, concurred. "We are risking our lives and we don't want one of us to be killed," he said. Kimi Raikkonen, driving for the Renault-powered Lotus team, had shards and lumps of rubber from one of the exploding tires strike his helmet and fall into his cockpit, with a heavy section of shredded, steel-reinforced tire that could have killed him flying past him as he competed for the race win. The next race on the 19-race Formula One calendar is at the Nürburgring on July 7, giving the sport's supervising authority, the Paris-based Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, or F.I.A., only days to come up with a solution. The F.I.A. announced immediately after the Silverstone race that it had demanded that Pirelli, the exclusive tire supplier for Formula One, attend a meeting on the issue in Germany on Wednesday. With fewer of the high-speed corners that appeared to have triggered the Silverstone tire bursts, the German track may be judged to pose less of a hazard than the British track. But two of the next four races, at Spa in Belgium on Aug. 25 and Monza in Italy on Sept. 8, feature ultrahighspeed corners, and a solution before then seems imperative. Many in the sport feel that Pirelli risks being made a scapegoat in the affair, since it was asked by the F.I.A. to produce faster-wearing tires for the 2013 season, to make for more pit stops, more uncertainty in the teams" race strategies and more competitive racing. Pirelli engineers have said that many of the 20 tire explosions in the eight races run so far - and the controversy they have stirred - are a direct result of the F.I.A. directive. It remains for the technicians to determine whether the Silverstone tire explosions were the result of design failures, including a switch from the Kevlar-based tire banding used in 2012 to the steel banding used this year, or to other inherent weaknesses in the tires - or, as many at Silverstone suspected, of drivers venturing too often onto the curbs on the exit from high speed right-hand turns and causing deep cuts in the tires as they hit "razor-sharp" ridges on the concrete. The fact that F.I.A. race officials ordered the teams to radio their drivers and tell them to avoid the suspect curbs after the initial tire explosions suggested that they, at least, had identified the prime culprit. But what happened when two extended safety-car periods ended, leaving the drivers to race flat-out to the checkered flag, suggested something in the nature of Formula One drivers that has changed little over the decades. Noting that lap times continued to fall as the end of the race neared, and that the leading drivers were still using every inch of the exit curbs, Martin Brundle, a commentator for Britain's Sky TV who himself competed in nearly 160 grands prix, suggested that seeking a solution in the drivers" self-restraint in avoiding the curbs at speeds of 150 m.p.h. and more was a fool's errand. "Racing drivers are hard-wired to shorten a racetrack, to make it as many meters shorter as they can get away with without getting a penalty, and that's exactly what they're doing," he said.