by Jonathan Ingram with Dr. Robert Hubbard and Jim Downing

EXCERPTS

The Intimidator – Chapter 1

It takes some looking to find the statue of Dale Earnhardt at the Daytona International Speedway. Standing in front of administrative buildings, it’s far off the main pathways leading to the massive array of grandstands.

For a man who made his mark in the thundering cauldron of stock car racing, by location and composition the memorial is deceptively quiet. Reminiscent of the works by the great sculptor Rodin, the bronze Earnhardt holds the massive Harley Earl trophy with one arm and the other has a fist raised high in the air, celebrating after a long-sought win in the Daytona 500 in 1998. The eyes smiling slyly above a wide grin and bristly mustache aren’t directed toward the sky or the horizon in a typical winner’s pose. An all-seeing gaze looks where his fans would be, taking them in as much as they might be looking up at him, all reveling in the moment of triumph.

That was Earnhardt, a big man who stood out but appreciated his fans as much as they admired his unalloyed commitment to prevailing against the odds. For all of Earnhardt’s outsized image as “The Intimidator” and his wealth minted from success and fame, he retained his roots. He understood the physically and psychologically demanding work behind the wheel symbolized the struggles faced by stock car racing fans, most of them work-a-day Americans, the same as Earnhardt’s family. He also understood the sport he loved had always needed champions willing to help grow its popularity by being accessible.

What brings the statue to life is the tension created by the one arm cradling the heavy trophy to his side and the other lifted in exultation high above his head. The stance has his upper body, shoulders and neck slightly bowed—Rodin-like—as if to exemplify the strength and combative persistence needed by a 20th Century racing hero, standing his ground, testing himself against the resistance, propelled by an almost super-human inner drive to rise to the challenges posed by the sport and its inherent risks.

There is a universal humbleness to the slightly stooped posture, which is also a reminder of the sad ending. The odds finally won at the Daytona 500 in 2001, when a typically aggressive Earnhardt was killed on the final lap by what seemed to be an uneventful meeting with the wall during a battle for third place. A few degrees in either direction in the angle of impact and the No. 3 car’s inertia would have been absorbed by an ongoing series of spins.

The Death of Senna – Chapter 8

Those in racing who were closer to Senna tended to present him in a more nuanced light, which included Dr. Sidney Watkins, the head of neurosurgery at the London Hospital. The medical officer of Formula 1 and a former professor of neurosurgery at the State University of New York at Syracuse, he was known as Professor Watkins or “Prof” Watkins. He became a friend and confidant of the Brazilian driver, who arrived not long after Watkins first took responsibility for ensuring a prompt medical response to drivers involved in crashes. (This was at the behest of Formula 1’s driving businessman Ecclestone, who perhaps foresaw the need for greater safety and the politically risky prospect of drivers getting killed during live TV coverage he was so instrumental in organizing.)

Watkins, in his book Life at the Limit, Triumph and Tragedy in Formula One, recalls the time when Senna made a visit to the Loretto School, Scotland’s oldest boarding school located near Edinburgh. Watkins’ stepson Matthew Amato was enrolled at Loretto and had requested a visit from Senna in a letter that was hand-delivered by Watkins. The professor further encouraged Senna to come to Loretto and then enjoy some fishing with him in the River Tweed.

There was great interest in Formula 1 at Loretto. Jim Clark, the two-time World Champion, had attended the school and the Clark family’s farm was located in the rolling hills of the nearby Borders district. Senna’s visit came prior to the start of the 1991 season and shortly after he had won his second World Championship—– the one he had clinched by intentionally taking Prost off the track in Japan. After walking through the memorial to Clark in the chapel, Senna addressed the high school enrollment during the mandatory bi-weekly Saturday evening lecture, which usually featured speakers from industry or medicine.

“We thought Ayrton would be a good one to have,” recalled Amato in an interview 20 years later. He was 15 at the time he requested the visit by having his stepfather deliver the letter to Senna. “He gave a really good talk about what it takes to be a Formula 1 driver and about Jim Clark. He said he liked the fact that Jim Clark always had a smile.”

The bulk of the lecture was a question and answer session and the first question came from a future barrister. It was about rival Prost and what he thought of him? “Wow, first question!” said Senna, who went on to praise his rival in some detail.

“It was the etiquette that we had to address the lecturer as ‘Sir’ before we asked a question,” said Amato. “About three or four questions in, he said, ‘You don’t have to call me sir.’ The next question he got, the guy called him ‘Ayrton,’ and he said, ‘Yes, like that.’ By the end everyone was calling him Ayrton. He answered a lot of good questions about the pressures of the job and even about sponsorship by tobacco. At the end he said he was impressed by the caliber of the questions that were asked. It went on for a couple of hours.”

“He talked about how he had to come over and how he had to work hard,” continued Amato. “He gave advice with an ear to a young audience about how important it was to work hard to achieve a goal. He talked about sacrifice and being away from his estate in Brazil and his boats and water skiing. He gave very good, thoughtful answers to the questions, which I think is not a given for many sports people. He was very comfortable talking about his faith in God. It was more from the perspective of answering questions about the danger of his job and was he scared of losing his life? He said he had faith and that helped.”

The Bishop of Truro, at the school to conduct the Sunday service the following day, was at the gathering and later in the day had a heart-to-heart conversation with Senna before the driver returned to Portugal for testing. “On Sunday the Bishop of Truro began his sermon,” wrote Watkins, “with the confession that he had been spiritually and verbally outclassed as a preacher by Ayrton Senna.”

____________

After Clark’s death there was concern the sport would be outlawed due to the obvious lack of safety represented by the fatal crash of its greatest driver. But the absence of scale when it came to motor racing’s popularity and the lack of broad commercial involvement precluded any great backlash. The tragedy was significant enough to warrant a same day announcement in America on the Wide World of Sports by host Jim McKay, who was the broadcaster for the Indy 500 during Clark’s assaults on the Speedway. But regular live TV coverage of Formula 1 was still years away. That, too, helped keep in check the tide of public criticism about the dangers of motor racing.

The death of Senna, whose estate was valued by some as high as $400 million, occurred on the opposite end of the spectrum when commercialization was in full bloom. His crash in a car powered by Renault and sponsored by the Rothmans International tobacco company was beamed into homes, bars, motor homes and public houses globally, the same medium that had made the Brazilian driver a leading light in the daily march of sports heroes across TV screens everywhere.

Testy Testing – Chapter 15

During testing on track with Newman/Haas Racing drivers in the winter of 2000, the Model II HANS created during the sled tests in Germany by Mercedes-Benz evolved significantly. What was learned in CART soon became the basis for HANS models used for all reclining drivers, including those in F1, as well as drivers in upright seats such as stock cars.

The testing at Sebring International Raceway was relatively easier for Michael Andretti, whose beefy upper body meant the new, smaller Model II yoke did not put undue pressure on his collarbones. It was not the same for the taller, lankier Fittipaldi.

Oddly enough, this fit Dr. Steve Olvey’s strategy. He thought working with Fittipaldi the best choice, in part, because he was regarded as a prima donna. “I reasoned that if I got the pickiest driver that we had, one that can’t tolerate any unnecessary discomfort in the car, or any changes and he accepted it, we could then convince the other ones,” said Olvey. “I was close friends with Emerson Fittipaldi, so Emerson helped me talk his nephew into trying the HANS during the winter testing period. At first, he absolutely hated it, but agreed to continue using it.”

From the outset, Fittipaldi recognized that the HANS Model II wasn’t ready for the reclining seat in his Indy car, no matter how much testing it might have undergone in sled tests.

“It’s not easy when you go around a road course in a Champ Car,” recalled Fittipaldi of the Sebring tests. “Those cars had almost 1,000 horsepower and you’re flying over curbs and just running all the time and surfaces that are uneven. It’s a different story than going around on an oval where you don’t have the bumps like at Sebring. On an oval, you’re not braking or accelerating, you’re at a constant speed all the time. You’re only turning one way. On a road course, you’re aggressively turning right and left, sometimes when you’re turning, you’re flying over a curb.”

HANS inventor Dr. Robert Hubbard understood the problem. "Because of the complex shape and movements of shoulders, the only way to get an acceptable fit was to make HANS prototypes for the drivers, then try to find fault with it," said Hubbard. "Then, we would have to change the shape and try again. This cut-and-try shape development would be mostly the responsibility of Jim Downing and fabricator Jerry Lambert at Jim Downing’s racing composites shop in Atlanta. We also would have to search out and try several padding materials. The cooperation and patience of the Newman/Haas team was essential to arriving at shapes that the CART drivers could accept."

“Sometimes we stayed several days in Sebring and we spent a shitload of money,” said Fittipaldi. “There were times that it was so bad I couldn’t drive the car on the limit. So, the laps I was doing we had to wipe out. We were burning tires, we were burning fuel only to develop Dr. Hubbard’s stuff.”

The team calculated that testing at Sebring cost $1,500 per lap—–including supplementary expenses like plane tickets and transporting the cars. With the testing of various HANS iterations remaining so long at the top of the clipboard list of priorities, tempers occasionally flared. “At a certain point the conversation started to heat up,” said Fittipaldi. “I think Dr. Hubbard was expecting me to say something. For me life is very black and white. So, there were times when I got out of the car and said, ‘Hey dude, the thing is shit.’ Even if he spent four weeks, or months or whatever, I was worried about my safety and the safety of my colleagues. I was worried for what he was trying to implement and I wanted to guide him in the right way and not be political and not tell him something wrongly.”

For his part, Hubbard had a great deal of experience working with young, idealistic people. The patience developed by years as a college professor in addition to his dedication to the task at hand helped sustain Hubbard on his typically even keel. At one point, Fittipaldi looked at the HANS inventor and said, “Dr. Hubbard, you don’t like me very much do you?” Hubbard declined to answer that day at Sebring. “I thought about it and when I saw Christian the next day,” recalled Hubbard, “I told him, ‘Christian, I like you well enough to save your life.’”

___________

All the chipping away eventually led to the day in Fontana when HANS inventor Hubbard came to a jolting realization that his dream for safer racing was about to be realized. At the finish of the season-ending 500-mile race held one year after Greg Moore’s fatal crash, despite a multitude of blown engines that crashed or sidelined all but six cars, no driver was seriously injured.

Fittingly, in every sense of the word, Christian Fittipaldi, the one driver who had done the most work to develop the HANS Device, was the man standing in Victory Lane that day.

Buy Now

UK, Canada, Europe Order Here