When you arrive to pick up your credentials at a motorcycle racing event, they make you sign a form. On that form, you are informed that motorsports are dangerous in whatever capacity you attend, and you do so at your own risk. If you don't sign the form, you don't get your passes, that's how seriously they take this.
For this is something that race fans tend to forget: motorcycle racing really is dangerous. For years now we've been spoiled, with riders invariably getting up and walking away, or at worst being flown out to the nearest hospital in a medivac helicopter, making their return with steel pins holding broken bones together, after missing just a handful of races. Only occasionally does it end badly, such as when Craig Jones was killed in a World Supersport race at Brands Hatch in 2008, or when Daijiro Katoh suffered fatal injuries during the 2003 Japanese MotoGP round at Suzuka.
But even those accidents were a sign of how things have changed. In the early years of Grand Prix racing, all the way through to the mid-1970s, Grand Prix racing would lose a handful of riders every season. Protective gear has improved vastly over the years, and the track especially have seen huge changes, with street circuits disappearing, hard obstacles being removed and walls being pushed back as far as possible, and then covered in air fence for good measure.read more
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