Crash!

But what about when you’re no longer in charge of the car’s trajectory and, in one form or another, you’re going to leave the circuit and, in all likelihood, hit something quite hard? Your initial thought as you head towards that barrier is generally ‘brace brace’, like you see in aeroplane safety videos. I’ve noticed a lot of current drivers choose to keep their hands on the wheel to brace themselves for the impact which I don’t fully understand as it risks breaking a wrist. If you rewind even a decade, you’ll see that drivers always took their hands off the wheel and made their bodies as relaxed as possible before the bang.

It’s after the bang that I think drivers from the 1990s onwards differ, not just from those before us, but also from people who have crashes on the road. In every single crash I’ve had, as soon as the car stopped moving my first thought was, ‘How bad is the damage? How quickly do I think the mechanics can fix it for me to be back on track?’. Getting back on track has always been the number one thought in my mind – not, ‘am I ok?’. Accepting the risks involved every time you swing your leg over the side of a cockpit is a given and as a driver, if the potential dangers start to weigh on your mind, that’s probably a time to stop and do something else.

If you look at Martin Brundle’s terrifying crash in Melbourne in 1996, you’ll see that immediately after he got out of the car he was running up and down the pitlane trying to get the FIA doctor to give him a green light to jump into the spare car. Think of Michael Schumacher when he crashed at Silverstone in 1999. The adrenaline was pumping so hard his first thought was to rush to get into the spare car, and only subsequently realising that his leg was broken enough to put him out of action for several months.

That’s not to say that drivers are completely devoid of feelings and emotions about crashes. I remember a crash at Oulton Park during pre-season testing in Formula 3 which completely destroyed the back of the car including the gearbox; as a young and impressionable 18-year-old, that one accident ruined my confidence for several months. I know the cause was a stupid error – trying a bit too hard on cold tyres during a February test day – but it still took me a long time to shake it off.

This compartmentalisation of a racer’s brain really got tested back at Le Mans in 2013. Within the first hour of the race, the Danish driver Allan Simonsen had a crash at the fast Tertre Rouge corner leading onto the Mulsanne Straight. The safety car was called out and the team told me to get ready as we were going to do a driver swap for me to do my first shift in the race. Just as I put my helmet on, word came through to all the teams that Simonsen had passed away as a result of the crash.

I’d never been in a race where a driver had been killed so it was a bit of a shock but before I could process it, the car was coming down the pitlane and I had to jump in. I drove around for a few laps in the safety car train, passed the corner where the barriers were being repaired and soon we were back up and running. It sounds callous but the honest truth is that my thoughts never wavered from thinking about how fast I could go through Tertre Rouge from the very first lap that we went green again.

A few days later, once the adrenalin and exhaustion of the weekend had passed, I remember chatting with some friends about what weird people we are. A fellow driver, a human being, has died and yet we all carried on driving around at 200mph in the rain at night. My ‘civilian’ friends couldn’t really comprehend it, but I guess that’s the difference between them and professional racing drivers – the buzz you get from nailing a good corner, a good lap or a good race is a reward that heavily outweighs the negative feeling from a crash.

I think Roger Federer’s brilliant quote sums up the importance of an athlete needing the ability to learn and crucially move on mentally much faster than anyone in the real world, and certainly this applies to racing drivers when it comes to dusting themselves off from crashes. He said: ‘I won almost 80 per cent of my matches… Now, I have a question for all of you. What percentage of points do you think I won in those matches? Only 54 per cent. In other words, even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play. When you lose every second point on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot. When you’re playing a point, it has to be the most important thing in the world – and it is. But when it’s behind you, it’s behind you.’

We all make mistakes but the difference in top sports people is their ability to learn from them while not being held back, let alone haunted by them. Learn and move on. It’s what it’s all about.