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Making the FIA a real global player

Formula One is a sport known for champagne and shunts © Getty Images

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One of the interesting things about the so-called 'off-season' is the way in which it strips you of your ten-month Formula One bubble and forces you to interact with real people, many of whom couldn't care less about technical regulations, wheel-to-wheel racing, or the outcome of any championship.

Having spent the bulk of the past year living and breathing all things motorsport it becomes somewhat refreshing to chat about mortgages, house prices, and whatever else it is normal people are supposed to focus on.

Because cocktail party small talk often begins with 'and what do you do?', I often find myself talking F1 with people who couldn't care less about the sport, and what has struck me most is that for the uninterested wider world, talk of Formula One triggers two associations: massive shunts and the champagne podium ceremony.

Based on the small sample size of my cocktail party researches, it seems to me that any efforts made by FIA president Jean Todt to position the Federation as a global guardian of automotive safety are unlikely to bear much fruit.

There is no denying that the FIA has been the driving force behind massive improvements to safety in motorsport as a whole, not just in F1. The FIA's Action for Road Safety campaign does excellent work, but will always be overshadowed by the United Nations' similar efforts - the UN is a global household name, while the FIA is an important but niche federation.

Then there are the battles to be faced by the general public's perception that Formula One is about crashes and champagne, two things that are not traditionally linked with any form of road safety. For those ignorant of the FIA's good works, what reason is there to associate the body behind those televised crashes with a concerted push to improve safety standards for pedestrians and drivers around the world?

But there is one very easy way for the FIA to position itself as a global leader in safety, the authoritative international voice to which all other bodies turn for advice: head injuries and helmet technologies.

As part of their efforts to improve sporting safety, the past twenty years have seen the FIA develop an extensive body of research into impacts of various sources. Since the 2009 accidents of Henry Surtees and Felipe Massa the FIA have introduced a new mandatory helmet standard that includes a 50mm Zylon strip across the top of the visor and into the helmet, because the addition of Zylon was found to double the impact each helmet could withstand.

Helmets are getting lighter as composites technology improves. Not only does this make them easier to wear, but lower weights also reduce the potential of whiplash-related injuries during high G-force shunts. New composites bring with them new opportunities - modern helmets are designed not only to absorb the impact of a flying object, but also to deflect it, to spread the shock across a wider area and diminish the effect on the collision point.

© Sutton Images

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Given that we continue to see other sports suffer the effects of poor helmet design - be it cricketer Phil Hughes, who died after being hit on the head by a ball last month, or the legions of American football players and other athletes from impact sports suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy - why does the FIA not make more of the fact that it is a world leader in helmet safety?

The wider public may find it hard to accept that the crashes and champagne sport can have anything to do with road safety, but given that they have seen dozens of scary shunts from which the driver has walked away unscathed they will not find it hard to believe that we as a sport know a little bit about helmet safety.

Once the FIA has established itself as the sporting world's leader in helmet safety, in advising on minimising the risk of traumatic brain injury in sport, then the Federations efforts to improve safety standards elsewhere will come with a foundation of credibility which - while deserved - we currently lack amongst the general public.

© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.

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