Time & Perspective Quote by Jacky Ickx

Two colleagues died each season: the sentence lands with the blunt efficiency of a crash report, and that is the point. Jacky Ickx isn’t trying to dramatize danger; he’s exposing how thoroughly it was normalized. “It was generally accepted” is the chilling clause, a passive construction that dissolves responsibility into the air. Not “we accepted it,” not “the sport accepted it,” but a foggy consensus that made preventable death feel like weather.

The intent reads like an indictment delivered in a calm voice. Ickx came up in an era when motorsport sold itself on bravado and the romance of speed, and the public appetite for spectacle quietly subsidized risk. Drivers were marketed as gladiators; fatalities were treated as the price of authenticity. By framing death as seasonal, he reveals a macabre predictability: not an accident, but a rhythm. The subtext is that people adjusted their expectations rather than their safety standards.

What makes the quote work is its refusal to perform grief. It’s memory stripped of sentiment, which forces the reader to do the emotional labor. The economy of language mirrors the culture he’s describing: a professional world trained to compartmentalize, to show up the next weekend, to treat the empty seat as tragic but not disruptive.

Coming from a “celebrity” athlete, the line also punctures the myth that danger was purely personal choice. When a workplace anticipates a body count, individual courage becomes a convenient story that lets institutions - organizers, teams, regulators, even fans - stay unaccountable.