We all have to remember that it was a whole different culture back then – not making excuses for it, but it’s worth remembering that death on the roads was also far more common back then. This was the immediate post war generation, who’d witnessed and accepted avoidable death as a daily occurrence.
In the 60s, my father worked for Lotus in the pre Hethel days – they were in Cheshunt I think. He was a project manager on the Lotus Cortina I believe. Amongst other things, he was tasked with recovering crashed Lotus sports cars and vividly recalls attending a wrecked Elan and finding a woman’s shoe with a foot still in it. His feelings toward Colin Chapman are very negative, he’s gone so far as to describe the Lotus road cars of the day as inherently unsafe.
The bulk F1 team was staffed by unpaid volunteers, who’d go along to races and help out as mechanics for the good of the company. He tells me that an F1 car of the day was supposed to have a bulkhead between the engine, fuel tank and driver. In the Lotus, with the never ending quest to shed weight, that bulkhead was made of cardboard.
And by today’s standards, the drivers were paid absolute peanuts too.