Mika Häkkinen reveals: ‘In the 50s you needed big balls to survive F1’

Reflecting on older cars, Häkkinen said: “When you do test those mega old cars from the 50s, you seriously need big balls. You need a serious cut to maximize it, you know.”

He contrasted that with his own era in the late 1990s and early 2000s: “Going to my era, which is 90s, late 90s, early 2000s, I mean it was fantastic. You know it was so safe, you felt really secure so you could take incredible risks.”

Häkkinen then pointed to the dangers faced by earlier generations of drivers, including Mario Andretti and Jackie Stewart: “But again those drivers who were doing those times — and we’re talking about those two, three gentlemen there — they were in an era when the Formula One cars were mega dangerous.”

His comments highlighted how advances in car design and safety standards allowed drivers of his era to push performance further, while previous generations competed under far greater personal risk. Mika Hakkinen's thought is not so far from the reality, drivers such as Alberto Ascari, Peter Collins, Wolfgang von Trips, Jim Clark, Jochen Rindt, François Cevert, Ronnie Peterson, and Gilles Villeneuve were among those killed in crashes between the 1950s and early 1980s. In the modern era, tragedies continued with Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna in 1994, and later Jules Bianchi in 2015. The difference between the first and the second era is frightening.