On Thursday, October 31, 2019 at 4:56:24 PM UTC-7, Bob Kuykendall wrote:
On Thursday, October 31, 2019 at 4:20:55 PM UTC-7, wrote:

The Isle of Mann TT is an outlier even among motorcycle racing.

Beat me to it. In my experience, racing at a well-equipped track like Sonoma (nee Sears Point) is safer than riding on the street. Everyone is going the same direction, no car is going to try to make a U-turn right in front of you, and all of the obstructions are padded. In the four years I raced at Sears Point, we only had one fatality.

Formula 1, rated on that page as ten times more dangerous than flying gliders, was insanely dangerous in the 1960s and 1970s, but in recent times went 30 years between deaths -- and that one was due to utter stupidity, with a driver failing to observe the warning flags warning to slow down because a large tractor was retrieving a car that had (safely!) left the track and hit the barriers, running off the road in the same spot, and hitting the tractor...