Professor Sid Watkins was just getting his newspaper out. The medical car, with Jacques Tropenat at the wheel, had just reversed into its shady slot under the trees beside the control tower. All seemed right with the world.

The Prof had just attended Jenson Button's accident during practice on Saturday morning. It had occurred at 10.19 and 20 minutes later, the driver had been dispatched to the Princess Grace Hospital and the Prof was ready to begin reading his paper again. "He's in good condition, conscious throughout and he's just gone to the hospital for a check-up," reported the Prof.

How different it had been nine years earlier, when Karl Wendlinger crashed his Sauber at exactly the same spot in the closing seconds of Thursday morning's practice session. A picture in Autocourse, taken soon after the accident, before the Prof had arrived, reveals a marshal supporting the Austrian's head. Like Button, he was subsequently taken to the Princess Grace, but there a scan revealed a brain contusion and swelling. Soon after, he was transferred by helicopter to the St Roch hospital in Nice, where he remained in critical condition in a medically induced coma for many days. He would never race in Formula One again.

What had happened in the intervening years was part of a policy begun by FIA president Jean-Marie Balestre in the seventies and continued by his successor Max Mosley: making the sport safer. But Wendlinger's accident, together with several both before and after, was a blip in that policy, which was quickly acted upon.

There are now no less than three commissions whose brief is to make the sport safer: research, safety and medical. All three are chaired by Professor Watkins, a former neuro-surgeon now retired - although "my telephone and fax are busy every day of my life, even when I'm on holiday in America. I've got a full job, although it's only part time!"

"The research committee was formed after a series of accidents," explains Professor Watkins. "We had JJ Lehto who broke his neck (early in 1994); Alesi broke his neck in the early part of 1994, Christian Fittipaldi had broken his neck the year before, and then we had (the deaths of) Senna and Ratzenberger, and then Wendlinger.

"So then Max (Mosley) created the research commission. After Wendlinger we had Andrea Montermini's accident (at Barcelona) and then Pedro Lamy had a huge accident at Silverstone, broke his legs, car went on fire, went up a pedestrian tunnel. We had all those accidents.

"So the first step we took was the investigation of the cockpit, to see if we could protect the driver more in the cockpit which resulted in the introduction of the high sides and the confor foam head and neck protection. There again, if you plot the concussions before, and the concussions since (the introduction of those high sides) the graph has just dropped away. Confor is an energy dependent foam. If you press it gently, it deforms nicely. If you hit it hard, it doesn't deform, so it doesn't bottom out. That means, if the head goes sideways, instead hitting the carbon fibre side of the cockpit, it just deforms the foam.

"For example, in accidents like Alonso's (in Brazil this year), he completely destroyed his head and neck rest. The foam is covered with Kevlar which is a load-spreading membrane and the membrane was disrupted and the confor foam turned to powder. He wasn't even concussed, it did the job. We now have foam padding all the way down to the feet down the inside of the cockpit."

Since 1994, there has been further progress. "We put the rear energy absorption on the back of the engine and gearbox, increased the side impact test, increased the frontal crash test and strengthened the roll bar, particularly after the accident at Diniz when it came off at the Nurburgring, but his head was protected by the high sides.

"We brought in the collapsible steering column after the Hakkinen accident (Adelaide, 1995) because he struck his head on the steering wheel and knocked off one of the carbon fibre controls, and he also struck his head on the side of the cockpit, so he had a double impact. The steering column is collapsible, it collapses at the level of the threshold for a head injury, so if the driver's head hits it, he takes less than the threshold for head injury.