Instead of continuing through Malmedy at high speed (left), F1 drivers had to negotiate a chicane at Malmedy (right) that did little to slow them down into the Masta Kink.

Drivers could strike telephone poles, ditches, barbed-wire fences, houses, earth banks and more if things went wrong - and they did for Brian Redman in 1968, who luckily escaped his blazing Cooper with just minor burns and a broken arm. While looked down upon initially, this gained some traction in the following years and even led to the cancellation of the 1969 Belgian Grand Prix.ĭanger at Every Corner (and Straight)At the time, the circuit's only safety measures, if they could even be called that, were straw bales on the outside of some of the corners - that was it.

Graham Hill and Bob Bondurant saved the fuel-soaked Scotsman from a potentially disastrous situation, which famously sparked Stewart's crusade for safety precautions in Formula One. Six years later, Jackie Stewart found himself trapped in his BRM after crashing into a telephone pole and ending up in a farm building. Over 14 kilometers of public roads winding through the Ardennes countryside were spectacular, but also inherently deadly, having infamously claimed the lives Chris Bristow and Alan Stacey minutes apart in unrelated incidents during the 1960 Belgian Grand Prix. Races at Spa were and still are rarely uneventful, and this usually meant the potential for disastrous accidents in the years of the circuit's classic layout. The final time it was used in F1 was in 1970 - and that race was a bit of a weird outlier compared to the ones before. Spa-Francorchamps is synonymous with F1, which is setting up shop there this weekend, and much of this stems from its early years using the classic layout on public roads - which was much faster and more dangerous than today's version. The Belgian Grand Prix is usually one of the highlights on the Formula One calendar as one of the races with the most tradition.

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