Balestre was an egotistical fool, and some dark episodes in motorsport have his stain on them.
I remember watching a documentary, it may have been the one mentioned in the article, and there were two friends who were involved in that Portugal incident interviewed, one accepted they were stood in a stupid place, but the other guy solely blamed Santos for the incident. He made some ridiculous reference about if a house is at the side of a road and car crashes into it, you don’t blame the house, and that Santos wasn’t good enough to control the RS200, all sorts of stupid stuff rather than just accept he was an idiot for standing there.