Time & Perspective Quote by Jacky Ickx

Fatalism, delivered with a driver’s shrug, is doing a lot of work here. Jacky Ickx frames a potentially lethal crash as a bargain: the fence saves his life, the broken leg is “only” collateral. That casual arithmetic is classic elite motorsport psychology, where risk isn’t an abstract concept but a weekly roommate, and language becomes a tool to domesticate fear.

The “fortunately” lands first, resetting the story from catastrophe to near-miss. Then he points to infrastructure - “they had set up… a fence” - as the quiet hero. Subtext: survival wasn’t just courage or skill; it was the belated arrival of safety culture. The sentence is awkwardly constructed, almost breathless, mirroring the disorientation of the crash itself, but also the era’s blunt relationship to injury: you don’t narrate trauma, you itemize damage.

Calling a broken leg “a small price” is not bravado so much as an admission of the alternative. In Ickx’s generation, the baseline for “an accident of this kind” often included fire, impact, or death. The remark functions as both gratitude and rationalization: gratitude toward the fence, rationalization toward a sport that asked its stars to normalize the unthinkable.

Context matters: Ickx raced through the late 60s and 70s, when safety upgrades arrived incrementally, often after public tragedy. The quote quietly endorses those changes without sounding like a campaign speech. It’s the voice of someone who knows that in racing, progress is sometimes measured in inches of barrier - and in bones that still break.