Does it make me a bad person that I don't care that much? Because for me, the drivers are mere formalities - the engineering is the thing. The game-theoretical penalty for losing a driver is losing the race, and casting a dour outlook on sponsors, aside from the emotional component of losing a team member. If that proves insufficient, you can raise this disincentive with fines and deposits, without imposing any hard limits on the tech.

Risk and dedication in the face of physical injury is a very substantial component of professional sports. Essentially every boxer and many/most football & hockey players enjoy the benefits of repeated traumatic brain injury. Olympians sacrifice large chunks of their lives to developing the physique and reflexes necessary to win - quitting doesn't get the first quarter of their lifespan spent rigorously training back. Some of our most celebrated sports are devoted to violent confrontational combat, like MMA, with every injury possibility that entails, and we have turned the simulation/infliction of injuries into a billion-dollar soap opera in WWE (go watch 'The Wrestler'). Nobody wants to go back to gladiatorial bloodsports where ten men enter and one survives per round, but we are more than willing to sacrifice a lot of the lives of the participants for the sake of the sport, no matter how much we like to pretend otherwise. It is monetarily impossible to go through so much driver flesh when the races cost millions of dollars to enter.

The direct veneration of bodily sacrifice to the act of winning is something that draws audiences by the billions, even if it's not to my taste generally - but a sport which shows me what I want to see (the human mind at its best rather than the human body at its best) at the expense of modest risk factors isn't such a turnoff.