Racing Accidents Quotes

IndyCar is what it is and in the back of our minds we all know it is a dangerous sport.

I always knew about the risks I was taking. Every year, someone you knew was killed racing. You had to ask yourself, do you enjoy driving these cars so much that you're prepared to take that risk?

A crash is part of the game. We've tried to make the cars a lot safer. There's no getting around it though. We're a contact sport.

F1 is giving penalties for people making mistakes instead of for people driving dirty. And that is wrong. Mistakes happen. You run into each other: that's life, that's racing, and too bad.

You don't have to be Einstein to see that horse racing is dangerous. Those two ambulances driving behind you aren't there for the scenery. I will never get over the fatalities of colleagues. It is the saddest and toughest part of this sport.

Unfortunately in motorsport, accidents can happen.

Hendrick definitely realises that we're young and trying to learn - and wrecking cars is part of how you learn. Jeff Gordon went through 20 something clips in his first season, but Rick Hendrick realised he had to take a chance on Jeff Gordon. They wrecked a lot of cars, but Jeff Gordon has given him four championships.

People always think that the worst time of my life must have been after the German Grand Prix crash in 1976, which put me in a coma and left me with severe burns. But it wasn't.

I was sure after the accident when in hospital in Hungary that I was not in the position not to lose any races.

When I was racing, we were more used to seeing some horrific accidents. For example, Michael Schumacher is a great world champion, but I haven't seen a weekend where he doesn't go off the circuit. At every race he always has a spin or runs through the gravel trap. He usually doesn't hit anything, but nevertheless it is an error that could not have been made in the days I raced.

People go to car races to watch the crashes.

There were a lot of races I was going to win at Milwaukee, but I had mechanical problems or something would happen, ... In the early years, it just took a long time for me to win a race. I got in somebody's oil one time and got in the wall, had a clutch go out once. . . so when I finally won one, it was a long time coming.

This is motor racing. We go at very high speeds, and tires have always been deflating or exploding. It is just part of the sport.

Especially with sports cars, when you have got so many cars on the track with various degrees of competitiveness, then something will happen. It's the nature of racing, the law of averages. If you want to be a front-runner then you are going to have to push very hard, and collisions can happen.

In NASCAR, you can do a lot of banging around and get pretty serious and even get yourself upside down. All of those things can happen - and then you give an interview two seconds later.

When I crash during a race and injure myself, what's the point in whinging? Because I put myself in that position. No one's making me race motorbikes - I want to go and race motorbikes. The most annoying thing for me is lying in hospital and not being able to get to work. I get beside myself.

My team and I used the actual footage to create a three-act story of the life of Ayrton Senna. There are no talking heads and no voiceover. Senna narrates his own epic, dramatic, thrilling journey.

Anything happens in Grand Prix racing, and it usually does.

It's short-track racing. You're going to get that and it's going to happen. I don't know why everybody thought it was the end of the world when wrecks were going to happen. Like I said, with close-quarter racing like that it's going to get heated.

I don't go to racers' funerals.

CART is one of the safest racing series in the world.

Motor racing can never be totally safe and it never should be in my opinion.

We can forget how motorsport can be dangerous.

Horseracing already has the highest mortality rate of any sport in the world per capita to the people who do it. If you crash in Nascar you still have a roll bar, and a cage, and a lot of protection. It's built to crash, but if you fall off a racehorse we all know what can happen, so it's tremendously dangerous.

Crashing is part of the sport. It sucks when it happens, but that's the way it is.