9781529939323 by Smakprov Media AB

SIMON LAZENBY

HOW THE PEOPLE WHO POWER FORMULA ONE THRIVE AT THE LIMITS

SIMON LAZENBY

EBURY SPOTLIGHT

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To my family.

Thank you x

FOREWORD BY DAMON HILL

Ihave been a friend and colleague of Simon since 2012, when we both embarked on a great adventure with Sky Sports F1 covering Formula One like it had never been covered before. I knew next to nothing about TV, and he knew almost everything. I had a lot to learn, so having him alongside was a huge bonus. He taught me everything about being in front of a camera and millions of viewers. I was an expert on being a Formula One World Champion, so at least I had something to give in return!

His reaction to Formula One, for the first couple of seasons presenting it at least, was tinged with a slight scepticism which, at times, I too have felt and that we bonded over. He viewed Formula One cautiously in those early years, unsure whether it was a completely ‘true’ or ‘pure’ sport. Maybe it was a wise scepticism, born of a journalistic stance of never taking things at face value.

That said, he threw himself into it with a commitment of the highest Formula One standard. Always utterly professional and thorough, he managed to absorb the entire history of the sport, together with the names and faces of all the key protagonists and personnel in less than six months in preparation for his debut. His ability as a live sports TV broadcaster cannot be matched. He was battle-hardened to the excitement and adrenaline rush of live events from his work with rugby and across many sports and could steer a straight course through even the most chaotic of mayhems, of which there are plenty in Formula One – thankfully!

During all those occasions he has never, in my experience, ever ‘lost his cool’. What he can do is listen to four different voices in his head at the same time and make sense of them all, remember his lines and deliver them on cue, to the split second, every time. He also has a unique insight and inspiration when it comes to the ad-lib.

The Formula One world is a travelling circus. After 14 years of going through airports, hotels, promotional events and being in the paddock from dawn to dusk, you develop close friendships and strong professional relationships. More importantly, you acquire a huge respect for the hardworking and talented individuals who make this sport happen, from travel co-ordinators and caterers to engineers and mechanics, designers, marketing and media teams. There really is a job for anyone in Formula One, if you are prepared to work hard and with passion. So, it is no surprise to me that Simon has felt the need to write a book that celebrates all those people, of which he is now one. His initial scepticism has evaporated, Formula One has got into his blood and he’ll never be able to get it out. The ‘pure sport’ within the sport has been revealed to him! And over the years, we even found the time to have a few drinks, play a lot of golf and even make a film together.

This book is about the people of Formula One who, like Simon, are as much a part of Formula One, as Formula One is part of them.

INTRODUCTION

The past 14 years have been an absolute blur. In the time that I’ve been working in Formula One, I’ve managed to marry a very patient wife who single-parents our two kids while I travel the world, reached 50, celebrated my parents’ golden wedding anniversary and bought a spaniel who unfortunately – when the low summer sun illuminates her orange fur and bleached blonde crown –bears a striking resemblance to Donald Trump. Life is flashing before my eyes as quickly as the cars that we follow around the world race around the track. While most of the other sports I have covered last 80 or 90 minutes, Formula One is always a four-day event that is totally immersive and becomes an addiction.

I, like many of my age, first got into it in the mid-1980s, when Nigel Mansell was oiling his tache and going wheel to wheel with the other titans of the sport. It didn’t occur to me then that I might get the opportunity to follow it from country to country and across continents. You never know how long your career will last in television and when the axe might fall, but while it hasn’t, the sole aim of everyone who I work with is to enjoy each minute and bring you as close to the sport as we possibly can. Therefore, when the chance came along to write a book on the subject, the first idea that came to mind was to introduce you to some of the remarkable people that I have met along the way.

This is my attempt to decipher a world in which, almost by accident, I found myself hurled into in 2012, when Sky won the rights to broadcast Formula One in the UK. At that point I was

presenting Sky’s rugby coverage and had been doing so since 2002. My boss in the rugby department was TV legend Martin Turner. He had given me, as he had so many others, my big break in TV by taking me on as a runner in the rugby department in 1998 and guiding me through my early career – something for which I am eternally grateful. Before then, my first job out of university was as a commercial management trainee for a large commodities firm called Cargill. It would be fair to say that I was an extremely average trader, haemorrhaging cash daily as I stared blankly at the numbers ticking up and down on the screen in front of me. Futures, spreads, options, arbitrage – the terminology was a different language and one in which I was nowhere near fluent. I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to the many Lincolnshire farmers who seemed constantly perplexed as to how I priced their grain, and especially to the stevedores of Antwerp and Ghent, who stood idle on the docksides as boats of different sizes arrived in the wrong order or not at all.

Inevitably, I walked before I was pushed (most likely into a vat of the soya bean oil that I was attempting to trade). Only 18 months out of higher education I stood at a career crossroads, KFC or McDonald’s, but thankfully inspiration came from within my own family. My sister was working as a runner on The Big Breakfast and thoroughly enjoying herself. I’m not ashamed to say that I followed her lead and made the move into the creative rather than the fast food sector by applying to Sky Sports for some work experience. In those days, there were opportunities everywhere as Sky grew rapidly by mopping up major global sports rights, but I had studied natural sciences at university and dissecting dog fish was in no way preparation for a career in the media … or trading, now that it springs to mind.

I started off making the teas and coffees and then got a chance reporting on some really terrible third-division rugby. Slightly encouraged by what they saw, they gave me what is known in the trade as a screen test. I had mine at the same time as Kirsty Gallacher.

You’ve probably seen her on things like Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway and she now hosts her own show on a major UK radio station. Anyway, I can’t have done too badly as the bosses persevered with me. Then, one day, while sitting in an edit suite, having received a grand total of about 30 minutes autocue training, I got a call from the deputy head of Sky Sports. His broad Scottish accent boomed through the receiver with a very simple message: ‘Gae home, son, get your suit, you’re on!’

Patting my Turkish editor friend Murat on the back, I drove at breakneck speed in my one-litre Volkswagen Polo Fox Coupe to my parents’ house to fetch a suit that I didn’t possess. I had to borrow one off my dad, which was a couple of sizes too big. As you might have noticed, if you watch Sky F1, style has never been one of my fortes but in the late nineties I’m pretty sure ‘baggy’ was in. I returned to the studios in Isleworth, was dabbed down with some make-up and then moved to the set of Sky Sports News. I was to partner a very experienced presenter that night who was extremely supportive despite the sweat that was running freely down my back.

And then the countdown came into my earpiece from the production assistant, ‘10 … 9 … 8 … 7 … 6 … 5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1’. It’s not rocket science or blast off, it’s speaking out loud, but to a 24-year-old it was about as terrifying a thing as you can possibly imagine.

‘And we’re on air!’

I don’t remember what the stories were, I don’t really remember much at all about the whole experience, but I definitely spoke out loud and continued to speak out loud for the next four hours until it finished. It was sink or swim. Thankfully, I didn’t sink but I may well have soiled my dad’s suit!

From there, the powers that be moved me around a variety of sports to learn on the job. There was ice hockey from Nottingham, bowls from somewhere in Wales, golf weekly, Super 12 Rugby, England cricket Test matches with some great characters like Phil Tufnell, Bob Willis and Clive Lloyd. I even did an endurance race

from Donington with Perry McCarthy when Keith Huewen turned up at the track instead of the studio! I’ve asked Perry since about this seminal televisual moment, but he doesn’t remember it. From there, I moved into outside broadcasts covering cricket and golf, before eventually getting the main rugby job in 2002.

That was a great decade: covering two Lions’ tours to New Zealand and South Africa, England internationals at Twickenham, plus loads of Heineken Cup and Premiership matches. And then, when the F1 rights came Sky’s way in 2012, I thought, Wow, that would be good fun.

Turner was a massive petrol head and Arsenal fan (sadly). He wanted to bring me across from rugby with him and I jumped at the chance.

My years in Formula One have been some of the best of my life and I’ve experienced things that I will never forget. Whether it has been hurtling down an Olympic bobsleigh run, jumping out of planes and helicopters, jet skiing with drivers in Monaco or being driven around iconic circuits by some of the greats, it has all been in an attempt to make entertaining television. But it’s not lost on me how lucky I am, and they are opportunities that I never take for granted. I often share these experiences with my travelling band of colleagues with whom I spend as much time as I do with my family. It’s a good job we all get on so well and I hope that comes across on screen.

That’s pretty much how I arrived at where I am today … and most definitely enough about me.

In the book, I return to the race that people still talk about to this day, Abu Dhabi 2021, several times because many of those I talked to were so close to the drama and have their own unique perspective. The title of the book is Pressure and that race encapsulated it for so many reasons. It wasn’t just the drivers who were feeling it, everyone was.

What follows are the stories of the men and women who make up the Formula One paddock. The unsung heroes and heroines. Of

all the sports that I have reported on or presented over my 27 years in television, Formula One is, without doubt, the ultimate team sport. To produce the fastest racing cars on the planet requires the dedication of, in some cases, teams of over 1,500 people. I can’t, for obvious reasons, cover every role, but I do hope to give you an overview of what makes the teams tick, how individuals learn to thrive under pressure and what makes the whole ecosystem work. From one race to the next, the show moves on. It is an enormous logistical, as well as sporting, challenge. Every team member has a specific part to play and each is, arguably, as important as the next. This is about them. It’s about a few of the people that I’ve had the privilege to get to know and who are extremely good at what they do.

I hope you enjoy it.

CHAPTER 1 THE MEDICAL CAR

Sunday, 5 October 2014 is a day that no one who was there in the paddock will ever forget. It was one of those dark Suzuka afternoons where the rain tumbles out of the Pacific sky and the cold chills you to the bone. It can be such a bleak and desolate venue when the rain sets in and yet so much has happened there over the years that it remains an iconic track, where championships have been decided in a range of heroic and villainous ways.

With a typhoon approaching and daylight fading, on lap 43 of the Japanese Grand Prix Jules Bianchi lost control of his Marussia and collided with a recovery vehicle at the Dunlop curve. Immediately, everybody feared the worst. As a broadcaster, the death of a driver was not something I had given too much thought to when I entered the sport, as no one had lost their life due to injuries sustained at a track since Senna in 1994. When Bianchi crashed, few of us were prepared for how to deal with it. There is very little you can say and little information flows, as Formula One goes into crisis mode. You simply report the facts and don’t attempt to speculate.

The memory of Anthoine Hubert’s fatal crash as he climbed the Raidillon curve at Spa in 2019 is equally numbing. Lewis Hamilton was going through the motions of a pen interview after qualifying when the crash happened; his eyes were immediately drawn to the big screen in the paddock. As he caught sight of the shunt in the Formula Two feature race for the first time he lost his train of thought. ‘Jeez, I hope that kid is OK,’ he stuttered. But he wasn’t.

Lewis knew how dangerous that part of the circuit could be and as Juan Manuel Correa ploughed into the side of Hubert’s car at 218km/h, Hubert was subjected to an impact force of 65G. He didn’t stand a chance: 90 minutes later, he was pronounced dead. Then there was Romain Grosjean’s crash on the opening lap of the Bahrain Grand Prix in 2020. I was sat in the TV compound watching with Karun Chandhok and Damon Hill when Grosjean veered right after contact with Daniil Kvyat’s Alpha Tauri. As his car ploughed through the barrier at high speed it was torn in two and erupted into a fireball. We all looked at each other open-mouthed and Damon shook his head. He has witnessed as much loss in Formula One as anyone. Damon was Ayrton Senna’s team-mate on that fateful day at Imola in 1994 and, as the son of Graham Hill, had endured the deaths of so many of his father’s friends behind a steering wheel, as well as his dad, in a plane crash, when he was only 15. He had seen this all before. As the inferno raged, every second counted and we held our collective breath as we waited to see if Grosjean would emerge from the blaze.

As is the way in Formula One, when there is a bad accident, there are no replays and the director immediately cuts away from the incident. Everyone watching was in the dark and praying Grosjean was OK. Miraculously, within a few moments, news emerged that the French driver was out of the car and being treated. And then, eventually, the world saw the pictures that highlighted just how lucky he had been – but also of the remarkable work of a few men who were simply doing their job. Two men in particular had been there in Suzuka in 2014, Spa in 2019 and at every Grand Prix in between: the crew of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) medical car.

Dr Ian Roberts was appointed the FIA’s medical rescue coordinator in 2013 having served as chief medical officer at Silverstone since 2008. Originally a consultant in anaesthesia and intensive care, he had been part of the helicopter emergency medical service and originally wanted to be a Royal Marine. Vastly experienced in

trackside emergency response before he made the step up to the top job, Roberts’s interest in medicine came from his mother, a nurse, while his background in emergency medicine and in particular neuro-intensive care served as the perfect grounding for working in motorsport. First and foremost, though, Roberts is a fan of racing and used to attend club meetings regularly at Silverstone in the 1990s while he was still working as a registrar.

‘I’m one of those people who can’t stand back and watch for long, I have to get involved. So I went to meet the chief medical officer at Silverstone at the time, David Cranston, and he invited me to join the Grand Prix medical team.’

Roberts spent most of his weekends, when not on call, standing on the banking at a range of different meetings, learning to be a trackside doctor and providing cover for those with more experience.

‘I believe in serving an apprenticeship and that is always my advice to any doctors who are trying to get into motorsport. I get suspicious of those who want to come straight in at the top. I started in the chase car behind a grid of 30 Minis. You learn so much at club meets, appreciating track craft and just being immersed in it, smelling the Castrol GTX!’

He progressed to working in the medical car at Silverstone, spent time in the medical centre, and eventually became Cranston’s deputy until he took over from him in 2008. During that time, Roberts saw first-hand how dangerous the sport can be.

‘I dealt with a significant number of deaths on track. Every one is a tragedy. I’m not trying to put a value on this but when you see those that come to the circuit as part of their hobby and they don’t go home at the end of it, don’t turn up for work on a Monday morning, it’s incredibly sad. With professional drivers there is a different understanding. At these club meets often there are fatalities and horrific injuries but they don’t get reported and they are even more heart wrenching as a result.’

Over the years Roberts has learnt to compartmentalise what he has witnessed.

‘I was a paediatric anaesthetist at a children’s hospital as part of my training and I have looked after some severely ill children, some who were damaged by their parents to such an extent that they required intensive care treatment and yeah, I found those much more difficult to deal with, particularly as some of them were the same age as my own kids. In motorsport I have found a way to concentrate on the needs of the patient. I tend to be very focused on what the problem is and trying to solve it, because by doing that, I’m doing my best for the person involved.’

Roberts was offered the job as medical rescue co-ordinator for the FIA by its president, Jean Todt, in 2012 and took over from Gary Hartstein, who had succeeded the late, great Professor Sid Watkins. Watkins was the original FIA medical delegate and stayed in the role that Roberts now occupies for 26 years. He is rightly lauded as a legend within motor racing. Nicknamed simply ‘The Prof’, he helped save the lives of many drivers, including Gerhard Berger, Martin Donnelly, Rubens Barrichello and Mika Häkkinen, as well as being on the scene and treating those who weren’t so lucky, including Ayrton Senna.

‘Sid was this mythical person, who had operated at the top level of motorsport for so long. All the things that he put in place in Formula One, the quality of the medical centres, the equipment, the procedures all filtered down and were adapted to the smaller race meetings, so his influence was huge.’

Watkins was a tough act to follow and so, when Roberts made the step up to Formula One, he knew the responsibility that he was taking on. The medical car was commissioned by Watkins after Swedish driver Ronnie Peterson lost his life following a huge firstlap incident in the 1978 Italian Grand Prix at Monza. It lines up at the back of the grid ahead of the start of every Formula One race, the thought process being that major incidents are more likely to happen at the start of the race when the field is bunched up and everyone is jockeying for position. These days it is either an AMG Mercedes or an Aston Martin DBX and they are primed to get

to any first-lap incident as quickly as possible. At the time when Roberts first arrived in Formula One it was driven by South African racer Alan van der Merwe.

A former winner of the coveted Formula Ford Festival at Brands Hatch back in 2001, van der Merwe topped that by winning the British Formula Three championship two years later. It was clear that he had the talent to succeed and he began to believe he had a shot at becoming a Formula One driver. As is the way with so many hopefuls though, the stars just never quite aligned for him.

‘I got called the day before I was supposed to go out and test with this particular Formula One team and I was under the impression that they were going to announce me as one of their drivers. It was six in the evening and it was a Milton Keynes number and I thought, oh great, they are going to give me my flight details. It was a really nice guy on the phone, I won’t name names, but he said, I’m really sorry, we’ve given the drive to someone else. I had one thought: Fucking hell! That was my introduction into Formula One. it’s a cut-throat environment. And yes, talent really matters, you need to be good to get there but once you past a certain point, it’s not just about that. You need to have the right surnames, the right manager, the right sponsors, even the right nationality.’

Van der Merwe’s is a familiar tale for aspiring drivers trying to reach the pinnacle of motorsport. After his hopes were dashed on a couple of other occasions he became disillusioned and was struggling to figure out what he was going to do next when, out of the blue, he got a call from Charlie Whiting, the FIA race director. It was midway through 2008 and Whiting asked to meet him at the first-class check-in at Heathrow. There he offered van der Merwe the opportunity to drive the medical car. It wasn’t the drive he wanted but it was a chance to have a role within Formula One. He took the opportunity, and his first race was the Australian Grand Prix in 2009, alongside Dr Gary Hartstein.

‘I knew nothing about anything, particularly on the medical side, at that stage. Driving the car is incredibly easy for a high-calibre

driver because it’s a road car and I was probably a bit overqualified for that part! But I remember at that first race sitting in the car and Nico Rosberg and Nelson Piquet Jr pulled alongside me at the pit exit to do their practice starts. I had a very intense, bitter feeling. That was my realisation that it was not a fair environment because I had kicked these guys’ arses in Formula Three.’

After that he learnt to cast off – or at least bury – any jealousy, and instead threw himself into learning all about his latest drive, serious about creating a more stable career for himself.

‘The medical car itself is the tip of the iceberg, it’s what everyone sees on TV, but the stuff that goes into it before then is this long chain of events. It’s all about the development of the safety equipment, the training of people around the tracks, the design of the cars and the circuits and it was the start of an incredible new chapter in my life.’

When the FIA didn’t renew Hartstein’s contract at the end of 2012, Roberts stepped in, and over the next decade the pair were to form a unique, unbreakable bond.

‘Gary was a very impressive individual, he knew his job inside out, but he had a very fiery temperament and he probably didn’t play the political game well enough. When Ian turned up and we started together, I thought, bloody hell, this is different. Ian wasn’t there for the glory, he never walked round with his chest puffed out. There’s a huge amount riding on you, he knew that and I knew instantly that he was the right person for the job.’

Roberts and van der Merwe had been working together and developing an understanding for a couple of years before they had to put everything into practice in Suzuka in 2014 after Bianchi’s horror crash.

Roberts – ‘I remember the conditions were worsening and we could hear chatter over team radio. I thought this is going to be red-flagged very soon. On my screen I saw a yellow sector pop up.’

VDM – ‘We were watching how the cars were behaving as they came past us and we knew that something was going to happen.

We saw the Sauber of Adrian Sutil go off and I said to Ian, “It’s fast, it’s blind and there’s a car off in that area, it needs to be red-flagged immediately.” Just 20 seconds later we got an impact advisory. The deployment went really well. Bernd Mayländer, the safety car driver, let us past straight away and I drove the best five corners of my life. But when we arrived at the incident we knew instantly that it was bad. You develop a bit of a sixth sense for whether it’s a serious accident for the human, just by looking at the car.’

Roberts – ‘I could see there was a Formula One car, but in my head I thought, What’s wrong with this picture? Something didn’t feel right. And then I suddenly realised it. The top of the car had gone. As it hit the recovery vehicle it had sheared the top off Bianchi’s car. And at that point your heart sinks.’

VDM – ‘We just looked at each other, shook our heads and cursed. I know it sounds harsh but you just let your emotional response come out and we’re on the intercom speaking only to each other. But it didn’t change our approach. We knew that he had probably hit the JCB in fifth or sixth gear at close to 130km/h. The line of survivability has been compressed with all the safety systems in place and 99 times out of 100 a driver in an accident will be absolutely fine. They might have a concussion but you don’t usually arrive at a crash and see broken bones anymore. It’s kind of a binary event nowadays with the survival cell. You either get there and they are OK, in the grand scheme of things; or they don’t survive. This, unfortunately, was the first one where we got there and thought, This is not survivable.’

Roberts – ‘I could feel Jules’s breath on my hand so I secured an airway whilst he was still in his seat. We gave him oxygen and he had a pulse, so at that point we reverse all the things that are reversible, i.e. good airway, breathing, oxygenation. Once he’s out of the car there is nothing more we can do on site, so we properly extricated him, ensuring that his neck was well supported because if he’s had a big hit he’s almost certainly going to have some problems with the C spine, and then he’s put into the ambulance and onto a ventilator.

But you could tell by looking at the eyes, the pupils, that he had had a catastrophic head injury.’

VDM – ‘The JCB was there to pick up Sutil’s Sauber so he saw the whole thing and he just kept asking, “Is he going to be OK? Is he going to be OK?”’

Roberts – ‘I got a message on the radio to tell us that the race had been stopped but that there was going to be a podium ceremony and I remember saying, “I strongly recommend that you do not celebrate on the podium.”’

Under normal circumstances, Roberts’s duty of care would have been handed over to the medical team in the helicopter or ambulance, but on that occasion, because of the severity of Bianchi’s injury, he decided to remain with him until he got to the hospital in Yokkaichi. Upon viewing the initial CT scans, Roberts’s worst fears were confirmed. Bianchi was put into a medically induced coma to give him the best possible chance of survival. The drugs he was given calmed his brain activity down, reducing its oxygen requirements in the hope that the swelling would reduce and allow the blood to be reabsorbed. It was about preventing the secondary injury that the inflammation had caused. Bianchi was taken out of his artificial coma in November 2014 and began breathing unaided. It meant that he was able to be transported to hospital in Nice, but it was to no avail. There he remained unconscious and in a critical condition with his family by his side at their daily vigil, but on 17 July the following year Bianchi passed away as a result of the injuries he had sustained nine months earlier.

In the days and weeks that followed, the pair went through a lot of soul-searching and questioned every action that they had taken that day in forensic detail. Did they get there fast enough? Could they have got the driver out of the car any quicker? Were all of the medical interventions carried out at the right time? Were they supporting each other with the right equipment at the right time? It was a string of endless questions that they needed to go through to process what they had just encountered, with the ultimate aim

of being able to say to themselves, yes, we did all that we could do to help the patient. In the case of Bianchi, after exhaustive selfanalysis, they arrived at that conclusion and it provided them with an element of closure.

But they always prepare for the worst.

It starts with both of them knowing the location of the equipment that they have in the car like the back of their hands. Roberts carries gloves, a tourniquet, airways and scissors in his race suit, a few pieces of emergency equipment that he can call upon when he first arrives at a situation. Under his seat he places a small trauma bag with ventilation, cannulas, basic monitoring and burns dressings. In the back of the car he has further tools that enable him to undertake more invasive interventions, including a video laryngoscope, a defibrillator, oxygen and intraosseous needles to get fluid into drivers’ bones if it is too difficult after an accident to locate the patient’s veins. If the driver is losing blood this allows him to get an IV into the driver as soon as is possible. As well as all the medical devices, they carry two fire extinguishers that can deal with any kind of blaze, even electrical, and a cutter to cut bodywork such as the halo device in order to get the driver out of the car as fast as possible.

They are supported at the track by a number of local teams including a regional doctor who always makes up a third person in the medical car and carries their own trauma kit. There are two or three extrication teams who specialise in the safe removal of drivers from the survival cell, as well as intensive-care-standard ambulances with ventilation and monitoring onboard.

No stone is left unturned and that dreadful afternoon in Suzuka further focused their minds on what they could do better next time. It is impossible for them to prepare for every situation but they never stop trying. They know from experience that there are certain points at different tracks where accidents are more likely to occur. Eau Rouge at Spa, the exit of the tunnel at Monaco and, on the faster street circuits such as Baku, at the end of the long straight. They also know which drivers are accidents waiting to happen.

VDM – ‘Ian and I spent a comical amount of time in the car being paranoid about being unprepared. We did so many dry runs in our minds. We were always working through scenarios that we had never witnessed before and, because incidents are less frequent these days, there are always long periods where nothing happens and everybody’s patting themselves on the back, saying how well everything is going. Ian and I were always the pessimists. It’s coming, something is coming and we’re going to have to deal with it. And that’s a brilliant motivator.’

Roberts and van der Merwe’s responsibilities extended to all Formula Two and Formula Three sessions over Grand Prix weekends and one of those scenarios van der Merwe mentions occurred on the second lap of the Formula Two feature race in Spa on 31 August 2019, five years on from Bianchi’s crash, at one of the most dangerous points on any circuit, anywhere in the world. Any driver who has raced around Belgium’s iconic circuit will tell you just how fast the Eau Rouge combination is. The circuit dips down and the left, right, left series of turns is often taken flat-out. The blind uphill section out of Eau Rouge is technically called Raidillon, and it was here that Anthoine Hubert suffered a fatal collision where once again Roberts and van der Merwe were first at the scene.

The slightest miscalculation at this section can have terrifying consequences. It wasn’t the first time that they had seen a crash of this magnitude. Kevin Magnussen had a horrible shunt at Raidillon in 2016 when his Renault ploughed into a tyre wall at 180mph. The Dane was lucky to hobble away with an ankle injury and was fit enough to race the next week in Monza. Other drivers down the years have not been so lucky, including German driver Stefan Bellof, who was killed in a World Sportscar Championship there in 1985 after colliding with Jacky Ickx.

Hubert’s crash occurred as a chain reaction after Giuliano Alesi suffered a puncture and crashed. Several cars behind him braked but Hubert was unsighted, clipped one of the slowing cars, hit the barrier and then rebounded onto the track. As he came back on,

American/Ecuadorian driver Juan Manuel Correa T-boned the cockpit area of Hubert’s Arden, sending it into the air and splitting it in half.

Roberts – ‘When we arrived, the scene we were presented with was a huge debris field, lots of bits of cars but also lots of big chunks of cars, so the idea was for me to find all the stricken drivers as rapidly as possible. The first question I asked myself was how many cars do we actually have here? It looked like two cars were involved but the debris was sufficient for three. You just hope that you’re going to pick up the driver that’s in the worst condition first. Thankfully I went straight to Anthoine.’

VDM – ‘I parked between the remains of the two cars that we could see and Ian went straight to Hubert because it looked like he had the most acute injury. I went over to Correa and I could see that he was fully conscious. It’s actually a nice thing when you arrive and the driver is screaming and very angry or in a lot of pain because you know that it’s salvageable.’

Roberts – ‘As soon as I looked at Anthoine though, my heart sank. Once the local medical team arrived I ensured that the simultaneous resuscitation and removal of the driver was going on, so that I could go and check the rest of the field. My task as part of the rescue co-ordination is to be very careful not to drill down on one particular driver, I have to understand the whole scene. I have to prioritise. Anthoine was unconscious and unresponsive, but Correa was talking and in a lot of pain from his ankle but he was conscious and so I first had to ensure Anthoine was receiving CPR.’

VDM – ‘The local doctor in the back of the medical car was Teddy, a huge bear of a man, always smiling, always laid back, and with Ian tending to Anthoine, he looked after Correa. It was hard to get him out of the car and made so much harder by the people that were arriving. The scene filled up quickly with people that were in shock. It looked like an aeroplane crash. We kept getting rescue trucks and things we didn’t need. Ian and Teddy needed space to do their job and I remember that a lot of people with a lot

of experience sort of fell apart that day. Seasoned rescue workers, who have worked at Eau Rouge for 20 years, their overalls faded but who had never seen a young kid who’s not going to make it. It was one where Ian needed support. He’s only got two eyes and two hands and he needed to deal with Hubert and Correa. That weekend was as dark as the Bianchi weekend. Hubert was a lovely kid, such a gentle individual, and to see him in that state wasn’t nice and it affected me. It’s a miracle that Correa got out of that as he did.’

Correa ‘got out of it’ with fractures to both his legs and a minor spinal injury and after being transferred to an intensive care unit in London was placed in an induced coma after falling into acute respiratory failure. He recovered but his rehabilitation took over a year. He has since returned to racing. Hubert wasn’t so lucky and despite the administered CPR continuing until he reached the medical centre, Hubert was pronounced dead at 18.35, just an hour and a half after the crash.

The following day saw the motorsport community pulling together as only they can, with Hubert’s family all present at the front of the Formula One grid ensuring that the show would go on. It’s always confusing to some why, when tragedy strikes, racing always continues. You ask any driver though and they would say the same thing. They know the risks when they start on their racing journey. That risk in motorsport is as high as it comes and yet every single one of them would say it was all worth it, to feel as alive as they do, while doing the thing that they love. Some have died for it and others will in the future. That is motor racing. The quest for it to be risk free is Sisyphean but doctors like Roberts will keep on pushing boulders up hills until the end of time, because they love the sport as much as those who take the risk.

The pair didn’t have to wait that long before they were next called into action for another extreme event. Their presence on the scene so quickly in Bahrain the following year, the night Grosjean’s car exploded on live television in front of a global audience, emphasised just how innate and telepathic their actions had become when

something serious happened. Years of preparation and discussion about improvement had become totally engrained.

Van der Merwe knew he was able to cut the first complex of corners via a service road in order to shave off a couple of seconds and stay close to the pack ahead of them. When they turned the corner they saw the fireball erupt in front of them. They were at the incident almost as it happened.

‘My first thought upon arrival was, Holy shit, where’s the car? It had split in two but there was only one half on the track.’

The front of the car had pierced the two sections of the Armco like a tin opener. That in itself would have likely decapitated Grosjean had it not been for the introduction of the Halo device in 2018. As it penetrated the barrier, the car was ripped in two and erupted in flames.

‘I ran over and could see through the gaps in the Armco, it was like looking inside a furnace and I could see Romain and I thought, He’s done!’

Trapped inside his survival cell, Grosjean knew the clock was ticking.

‘It felt much longer than 28 seconds. I saw my visor turning all orange, I thought about a lot of things, including Niki Lauda and I thought that it wasn’t possible to end up like that. Not now. I couldn’t finish my story in Formula One here. And then for my children, I told myself that I had to get out. I put my hands in the fire, so I clearly felt them burning on the chassis, then I felt someone pulling on my suit, so I knew I was out. My escape was like a second birth.’

The man pulling at his suit, of course, was Roberts. They had arrived at a raging inferno and his immediate reaction was to direct a marshal with a fire extinguisher to rebuff the flames. It was sufficient for him to get close enough to the barrier to give Grosjean a helping hand as he jumped clear and was in position to treat his burns immediately. As Roberts directed him away from the blaze, van der Merwe had already collected another extinguisher from

the back of the car and deployed some of it on Grosjean’s body to ensure there were no residual flames. It helped that the driver had had the clarity of thought to extricate himself from the car in under 30 seconds. Any longer and it would have been horrific. Roberts’s approach to the fire was enough to singe his face.

‘I put my hands up to protect me but I couldn’t afford for him to fall back into the flames.’

Thankfully Grosjean didn’t, but Roberts knew that he had to work quickly to assess the damage. One of the first things he had to figure out was whether Grosjean had suffered any internal burns through inhalation. Roberts had had experience of this a few years previously when on call in the emergency room at the hospital where he was training. A worker had been admitted after walking past a furnace in a factory just as the door had accidentally swung open. As well as suffering serious external burns he had also sustained a severe inhalation injury. When Roberts tended to him his first thought was to check his airway and upon doing this he realised that the swelling was closing the patient’s throat up. He just managed to get a ventilator into him before it closed completely. It bought the other doctors treating him some time, although unfortunately it still wasn’t enough to save his life. Burns are often fatal in the hours after the immediate trauma.

‘When we got Romain at a safe distance from the flames, I just wanted to get his helmet off and get him talking to me, so that I could assess if there was any damage to his airway. Then we assessed him for a head injury and immediately got his gloves off and applied some cooling gel to limit the damage to the part of his body that had the thinnest fire-resistant clothing over it, the gloves. Then it was into the back of the car as we thought that it was the quickest way to get him to the medical centre.’

Grosjean suffered burns to his hands in the accident but returned to the wheel in IndyCar and is still racing at one of the top levels in the US. Life goes on for him, and for others that Roberts has tended to over the years; his commitment to the Hippocratic oath is to be

admired. When he wasn’t working at race tracks around the world he continued to work for the NHS in the off season up until the end of last year. People think that he must be a millionaire working as the main doctor in Formula One, but he’s not. In fact he’s been paid less over the years than if he’d been working full time for the NHS. He stopped private work 12 years ago so that he could see his kids grow up. His sacrifices for the love of the sport he grew up watching have been as great as anyone up and down the paddock.

‘I gave up a lot of practice to come and work in Formula One, but I knew that right from the start. The decision was either to continue to work full time for the NHS and miss this opportunity, or have something to talk about to my grandkids when I’m 90. And that’s what I decided to do. So, you know, I’m not complaining, I’m just explaining.’

Van der Merwe left the sport in 2021 when, like many, he refused to take the Covid vaccine. He was replaced by Portuguese driver Bruno Correia, but he and Roberts still stay in touch and remain good friends. For a decade they worked tirelessly together to continue the work of Sir Jackie Stewart, Sid Watkins and all those who had committed to making the sport as safe as is humanly possible. And with Roberts still in charge and continuing to push in his role as hard as any driver would on track, you know that those who choose to risk their lives are in the safest pair of hands. They help the show go on even in the most trying of circumstances. The job of putting on that show falls to the promoter.