When Access Becomes Chaos: The Fan Safety Crisis Motorsport Is Not Seeing
May 2, 1986.
April 30, 1994.
May 1, 1994.
February 18, 2001.
October 5, 2014.
Five dates, each tied to tragedy and sadly - even more so than the individual lives lost - they don’t even come close to cataloguing all the deaths experienced by motorsports since their inception.
In engineering, there’s a saying: “Regulations are written in blood.” If there is a silver lining to each death, it’s that the engineering field of motorsport has taken this to heart so that every loss has led, eventually, to reform.
The result: today, it has never been safer to participate in high-level racing.
Track design, crash structures, racing equipment, medical response; all of these have progressed to the point where driver safety is now so advanced that Romain Grosjean can be engulfed in fire and walk away.
Jack Doohan can slam into a wall at Suzuka and step out of the car unscathed.
Think about that: in 2025, a driver can go off-track at what would have been a lethal speed not long ago, and social media is just as likely to gossip about their contract as the crash itself.
Thankfully, spectator fatalities have also become rare following the infamous catastrophes at Le Mans in 1955 and Rally de Portugal in 1986.
So it is now also much safer to be on the track, watching the race.
But there’s a blind spot. A big one.
One that I witnessed firsthand at the 2025 WEC 6 Hours of Spa-Francorchamps.
After attending Friday’s pit walk, I made a decision: despite having tickets for both myself and my wife, we wouldn’t return for Saturday.
Why?
Because Friday’s pit lane was a highly unpleasant experience which could have been much, much worse than that.
On Friday, I was shuffling through a crowd which seemed to have:
No structured flow.
No visible safety staff.
A growing crush of people in a confined space.
First-hand reports from Saturday confirmed the situation had only worsened, and if something had gone wrong, such as a medical emergency or even just a startling noise, the day could have turned tragic.
My observation is that motorsport has gotten very good at protecting drivers, and better at protecting fans from the on-track proceedings.
But at a time when interest in motorsports is going vertical, the FIA seems to have overlooked the need to protect the growing crowds from themselves.
This is not a new danger, as mass stampedes have unfortunately led to loss of life in many contexts. Again, the silver lining is that best practices and guidelines now exist, yet my research on the FIA’s website did not yield much in terms of crowd control documentation.
The only serious FIA guidelines I could find regarding crowd control were in the WRC section, probably originally formulated in the wake of the bedlam of Group B, and this still falls under the categorization of spectator safety rather than crowd safety.
As trackside access has increased at enclosed circuit events, we are entering a dangerous new phase, defined by the following relationship:
More fans x more freedom = more exposure to unmanaged risk
Perhaps I have missed a piece of key documentation, but take a look at the photo in the link above; does it look like any guidelines were followed? Can you honestly imagine a Belgian fire marshall signing off on what you see in the picture?
It is crucial that the FIA take action, because the numbers have been flashing warning signs for years. Spa’s attendance has grown roughly 36% since 2023 to reach nearly 100,000 fans, and that’s just one race. Spa and the other races on the WEC calendar all have different sections and “experiences” which must be managed safely, as well as the movement from one to the other.
The cynical view that I’m already hearing is that the FIA will keep selling tickets as long as there’s demand for them, safety be damned.
If money really is the driving force, let’s speak in commercial terms. TotalEnergies were the title sponsor of the race, and as one of the largest players in the oil & gas industry, whose obsession with safety comes from its own collection of gruesome incidents, any perceived lapse in safety anywhere its name appears would be unacceptable.
Safety is quite literally at the top of TotalEnergies’ core values, and I wouldn't be surprised if any incident - or even a widespread perception that there could have been an incident - put future sponsorship at risk.
In fact, here’s another anecdote for you, again from just one day at Spa: I was nearly run over by a large truck attempting to reverse, under a grandstand, while hundreds of fans were streaming by. I was bumped by another fan and thankfully kept my balance, but what if a small child had been in my position?
I got lucky, and I can tell you from first-hand experience that such maneuvers, without proper protocols to keep people away, would be unacceptable on any of TotalEnergies’ field locations.
My fear is that motorsport is again careening down a treacherous road it’s already travelled, waiting for something to go wrong before writing the rules (it’s worth mentioning also that I pitched this article as a guest editorial to several online publications and never received so much as an acknowledgement from any of them).
Let’s not do that.
I want to enjoy a day at the track with my wife, and another after that, and another, until we can’t physically go to the track anymore.
I want the same for everyone else and their family.
Let’s not wait until we’re reading about another disaster, this time not involving a car, but a crowd.
Not a fatal crash, but a failed evacuation.
Not a broken barrier, but a blocked tunnel.
This isn’t about catastrophizing. It’s about foresight, it’s about respecting people’s very lives by assuring them that if they show up to an FIA event, the only strong emotion they will feel is the joy they experience as a Hypercar or Formula 1 car flashes by them.
David Vaucher
Article cover photo credit: Anna Sullivan via Unsplash