Time & Perspective Quote by Jackie Stewart

Stewart’s outrage lands because it’s so plainspoken it feels accusatory: not tragedy-flavored nostalgia, not macho fatalism, just a blunt inventory of hazards that should never have been normal. The details do the moral work. “No crash barriers,” “fuel... in churns,” “could easily crash into the pits” aren’t poetic images; they’re a checklist of institutional negligence. By stacking specifics, he forces the reader to picture an everyday worksite that would be instantly shut down in any other industry. Racing, in that era, sold danger as authenticity. Stewart exposes how much of that danger wasn’t heroic but stupid.

The subtext is a critique of the sport’s old social contract: drivers were expected to accept lethal risk as part of the job, while organizers, sponsors, and fans enjoyed the spectacle at arm’s length. “Ridiculous” is doing more than describing; it’s a refusal to romanticize. It punctures the myth that death on the track was inevitable, reframing it as preventable, bureaucratically tolerated, even economically convenient. Safety costs money, slows things down, and challenges traditions that powerful stakeholders were invested in keeping.

Context matters: Stewart raced through the 1960s and early 1970s, when fatalities were frequent and safety campaigning could be dismissed as softness. His intent reads as both testimony and indictment, a veteran naming the obvious so it can’t be waved away. The quote isn’t just about fear; it’s about accountability, and about redefining courage as insisting on better systems rather than accepting bad ones.