The realisation of the danger of motorsport is at once the single most thrilling and gutwrenching moment for any motorsport fan. Thrilling because anyone involved in the sport is there for just that, the risk involved. Sadly, many competitors have died in the heat of competition, perhaps most famously Ayrton Senna who remains feted, and deservedly so, as the greatest F1 driver of all time. If you saw the film about him on Top Gear last week, you’d know why.

It’s a mark of how far the safety systems deployed in motorsport have come, that fatalities are thankfully so much less common nowadays, and today has shown just that with a number of incidents.

Lets start with a near miss. Michael Schumacher comes close to forcing his former team-mate and all-round good egg Rubens “Faster than The Stig” Barrichello into a solid concrete wall. I know Schumacher was “outed” as The Stig a couple of series ago, but to take revenge like this is a wee bit too far:

Now, take a look at this from the Superleague Formula. The guy apparently got away with nothing more than a broken leg:

Over in America, a guy called Elliot Sadler was able to climb out of his car after hitting a wall so hard, the engine detatched from the front of his car:

Finally, it seems that even motorbikes have become safer, either that or it was just VERY fortunate that of the two guys involved in this, one suffered a concussion and the other a broken collarbone:

Crazy.