Preface: I'm not a labor expert, nor a motorsports journalist. Just felt like there were some big parallels and wanted to write about it.
The 1989 Australian Formula One Grand Prix was one of the messiest, sloppiest, and dangerous races (to have no major injuries) I know of. Easy top 5 for chaotic races of all time. And I think there's a lot to learn about the worker/money-haver dynamic from it.
Background
I don't think it's unfair to say that race car drives are some of the most privileged workers in the world. Most of them already came from higher class backgrounds, as the money required to get into racing is not insignificant. Motor racing started out as an aristocratic pastime and it's never really gotten too far away from those roots, in my opinion. I still would not call it easy work, as the driving is a relatively small component of it, but it pays exceptionally well if you make it to the very top. Naturally things aren't quite as good if you're not at the top, but you're usually still making a living. The obvious downside, apart from arguably the fame depending on how you view that, is that racing cars very fast is dangerous. The further back in time you go, the more dangerous it gets. Even in the late 80s, there was a very very real risk of significant injury or worse every time you went out on track.
It was much more dangerous back in the 60s when the Grand Prix Drivers Association (GPDA) was formed. I'm not knowledgeable about pre 80s F1 and I'm not going to sit here and regurgitate a wikipedia article for you, but up until 82 they existed largely to have some swing when it came to matters of "please make this safer or we will not race". At the time this was things like, getting armco barriers installed instead of hay bails, actual medical facilities on tracks, and things like that. It was disbanded following a (ultimately successful) strike at the beginning of the 1982 season regarding, of course, one of the governing bodies trying to add restrictions to the racing license that would have made the driver's market easier to control by the team owners.
The main point here is that come 1989, there was no real driver's union on the F1 grid. Don't ask me what happened to the PRDA, I don't know.
Race Day
So come the day of the race it was wet. Really wet. Like way too damn wet. And all of the drivers, or at least a lot of them, really thought the race shouldn't be started. They were hoping for more than the 30 minute delay to hope it would all dry out. The race organizers and various commercial interests weren't too keen on this. Everyone around the world was expecting a race to happen at a given time, being broadcast out on whichever satellites, to various local TV providers who have already lined up various ads to play and so on and so forth. There were good business reasons, i.e. money reasons, to start the race more or less on time.
A quick aside here if you're not very familiar with F1 or motor racing in general. There's two big issues with racing in the rain. First is visibility; open wheel cars kick up tons of water, and the various descriptions of the visibility in those kinds of conditions I've heard over the years sound actually impossible. Things like, you need to listen for other cars because you can't see them and looking to the sides to look for landmarks instead of the track, things like that. Things you really shouldn't be trying to do at race car speeds. The best example I can give you is actually a quite famous shot from this race, but that will come later. The second problem is aquaplaning, where there is so much water that the tires of the car are lifted off of the track surface entirely, and the driver is no longer in any control of the car. You may have gotten a small taste of this if you've hit really big puddles at high speed in your car. Well, race cars have way wider tires, which makes that even worse. The second thing in particular is an issue that exists outside the realm of driver skill. If you hit a puddle and aquaplane, there's no stopping it no matter how good of a driver you are. And if you can't see the part of the track where the puddle has formed, you can't avoid it, assuming there's even room around it.
TL;DR, it's very dangerous when it's too wet.
So, drivers want to delay the race because it's not safe. It might very well be safe if they wait. Everyone in charge of holding the race wants the race to start, so they don't have to give back any money they were given. In the half hour or so during the delay, almost all of the drivers were out of their cars and walking around, talking to each other or the teams and trying to figure something out. Eventually, come the 30 minute delay, the effective commercial owner of the sport was walking down the grid telling the drivers that the race was starting, and the news spread from there as the pre-race countdown wasn't stopped. The drivers, at least some disgusted at the turn of events, all got in their cars. The cars normally all pull away from the grid at once, go around, then line back up for the start. Today drivers were still getting into their cars while others were leaving the grid, and it took over two and a half minutes just for all of the drivers to leave the grid, with lots of cars driving past cars surrounded by mechanics still preparing other cars. Instead of waiting for every car to come back to the grid and take positions, they just started the race when most of them had pulled up, with other drivers barely half way around the lap. This was, a gigantic mess, adding even more danger to the situation, and should never have happened. Still, after all of that the race got stopped before the end of the second lap, supposedly due to spun and crashed cars blocking the track somewhere. All of the cars stopped right before the grid, creating a parking lot in the final hairpin. It would restart 20 minutes later, this time in a more normal fashion, and despite well over half of the field spinning or crashing out, it completed two hours later without any serious injury.
This, if it was not obvious, was down to good fortune more than anything else.
The Drivers
One of the drivers, then three time champion Alain Prost, said he would do a lap and come into the pits and park the car. At the end of the first lap of the first race start, he did come into the pits and park the car, and never got back in. The only driver that never got out of his car during the whole 30 minute delay, and the wait between starts, was his team mate Ayron Senna.
Now for anyone reading this because they found it in the F1 tag, statistically you're likely to be a Senna fan. I'm going to get this out of the way, I think he's an asshole. Why? Shit like this. Why would he still be sitting on the grid ready to go? Because the race before this was Suzuka '89, where he made a lunge and Prost decided not to leave the space this time, turning into the side of him and causing both cars to stop. In doing so he won the championship as Senna needed to win the race, but Senna got the track marshals to push start him, got his wing replaced in the pits and went on to win the race. He was then disqualified for cutting a chicane during the bump start. This was all generally a big mess, and the disqualification was protested by Senna and his team (again, same team as Prost! Although Prost was leaving at the end of the year) and turned into a big icky legal battle I won't get into. That was still going on come Adelaide, and if Senna won this race he could potentially still win the championship, should the Suzuka decision be overturned. A slim possibility, but not entirely out of the question at this point.
So by staying in his car and refusing to protest the safety conditions of the race, he either really wasn't bothered by conditions that the majority of the grid really did not want to race in, or he was willing to ignore not only his own safety but the safety of everyone else on track in pursuit of his championship. In my opinion, the latter fits both his behavior before this race and after. I also believe that, had the two most recent world champions and first two drivers on the grid both said "this is too dangerous, we should not race", it would have been a LOT more difficult to get the rest of the grid to get in their cars. The lack of unified leadership was a major factor in getting the rest to break down and get on track.
Which brings us to that replay I mentioned. This is the rear facing camera shot from another car, with Senna's showing up.
This is a good idea of about what the visibility is, about a car's length. No time to react, no time to get out of the way, just a collision if you make the wrong guess. It was, with the sweetest irony, the poor conditions that put the final nail in the coffin of his championship push, and made all of the legal battles a waste of time from this point forward.
The Point
So why all of this? I do firmly believe at the very least, the drivers doing a better job of looking after each other instead of their own self interests could have prevented most of the stupidity that happened that day. I think that if they still had the full GPDA, and they had used that structure to communicate amongst the drivers and make decisions as a group, the race for sure would not have started like it did. Because neither of these things happened, many of people were put in a situation where they could have very easily been hurt or killed. Not even just the drivers, but track marshals and even spectators too.
Despite the delay from the race stoppage, eventual winner and noted wet race specialist Thierry Boutsen said in the post race interview that the track was too wet at the start, though it got better later on. In other words, if they had just waited an hour or two, it probably would have been much safer for everyone.
I found myself watching this race again recently and seeing it as, beyond all else, a dramatic example of why everyone should unionize. It doesn't matter how much you make, how cushy you think your job is, how your workplace is "different", or whatever. When push comes to shove, people with money will choose money over your well being. It doesn't matter how many people see the fallout of that either. Look at the mass public layoffs in tech and game industries lately, with huge negative reaction from the public but little change in buying habits. Look at companies being reamed in the press for requiring workers to come back into the office after publicly announcing that fully remote work is here to stay, blatant hypocrisy in full view, but the workers powerless to do anything about what are functionally mass layoffs that disproportionately affect anyone who isn't a younger white male. Look at F1 potentially broadcasting footage of people dying to millions of spectators on TV. Or if you think things have changed since then, look at F1 deciding that a race event should go on despite missiles landing 10 miles away from the circuit.1
I also think it's a great example of how workplaces approach these issues. Bernie Ecclestone, the previously mentioned commercial owner, has been described by many in the sport as the master of divide and conquer. He was interviewed after the first race stopped as follows:
Barry Sheene: "Bernie, you've seen what the drivers have done, what's your feelings now? What's going to happen?"
Ecclestone: "They haven't done anything! They've raced very very well, the race was safe, they did a bloody good job. I'm very proud of them all."
Sheene: "So what happened Bernie? How come they've only done one lap and they're all back on the grid?"
Ecclestone: "They only did one lap because the race was stopped, because a car spun and blocked the track. So now it's a completely new race."
Sheene: "Doesn't it endorse the fact that of what most of the guys are saying-"
Ecclestone: "Most of the, all of the people were running at the time of, when the clark of the course stopped the race. Nobody else stopped it. Prost decided to stop before that, that's up to him. Nobody else stopped. And how he's decided to start, so it can't be that bad!"
Sheene: "So he's going to start the race now?"
Ecclestone: "Well his car's there so I imagine so!"
If you've ever been in a bad workplace labor situation, this probably sounds familiar. Management will lie straight through their teeth, undermine whoever else they can in the process, and act like everything is operating exactly how it should. Any complaint from the workers that would impact the bottom line is downplayed, ignored, denied, etc. "You should just work harder! We're giving you money, just do whatever we say!" And they can, and will, absolutely use whatever comparatively tiny privilege you have as leverage against you. "You're already making so much money, why are you asking for more? You already don't work hard enough for what you make. Why should you have any say about what the the company does? That's our job, not yours. Don't like it? Feel free to fuck off, someone else is ready and willing to take your spot." Bernie and others would famously say, in conditions like this, that race drivers can always just drive slower. This is, for many reasons, very untrue.
All of this is to make you doubt yourself. Make you think that you're the only one who perceives this problem. Make you think that all of your coworkers are perfectly fine with this happening, and it's just another personal problem you need to learn from. The easiest way around this, and the thing your employer is most afraid of, is simply you talking to your coworkers. Not even in a union context, as simple as "hey isn't this actually kind of fucked?" This is why it's, in heaviest possible quotations "taboo" to talk about how much money you make; it's a real easy way to find out who your employer is fucking over. And it also shows how important it is for an employer to drive any wedge in between the employees they can. "Oh he's going to be starting the race, see?" He didn't say that, he has no intention of doing that, but if you only hear it from Bernie and not from Alain then whose to say?
This also goes to show why it's important for employees to, using the cliche, put aside differences and work towards a common goal. Personal gain, interpersonal differences, even maybe just not thinking that what everyone else is so strongly in favor for is right. Common goals need to take priority.
In another, this time much more tragic irony, it would be Senna who put into motion the reformation of the GPDA after the death of Roland Ratzenberger during Saturday qualifying in 1994. Senna had started that process on Saturday and then come Sunday morning, went into the race and died in an accident of his own. The GPDA has been active ever since.
Further Reading
So both the '89 and '91 Australian Grand Prix were extremely wet, and I remember an anecdote from someone, somewhere saying that at one of the two events the rain went away entirely a few hours later and it was dry enough to enjoy some of the concerts at the venue. In the process of trying to verify that, I found this motorsport magazine race report which goes into better depth, detail, and accuracy than I have here. I decided to leave everything I wrote as is, and link this at the bottom, instead of going back to revise anything. It's a very good read and I strongly suggest it if you took the time to read this far.
I feel like the opening paragraphs validate my previous statements about Senna. :p
-
To be fair, the GPDA did meet about that, but I don't think it's unfair to say that the drivers, if not the teams as well, were basically held hostage lest a race not happen. Pretty fucking disgusting.