I was watching the Champ Car GP of Road America when I saw probably the most horrifying accident I have seen.

A piece of her rear wing fell off the car on a section of the track where 170mph is not uncommon.  When she turned into the kink after the carousel, the back end became her front end and she impacted the wall and was sent flying.  The car took to the air backwards parallel to the wall, and hit the ground, splitting the engine and drivers cockpit from the chassis.  The engine was caught by the catchfence, and the cockpit tumbled to a stop.

It reminded me of Greg Moore's crash at Fontana, which is why I thought she did not make it at first, but when the President of Champcartold the press that she smiled and gave him a thumbs up before entering the medical center, I was relieved.

As I was thinking about the injuries that she probably sustained, something incredible happened-  She walked out of the care center and waved to the crowd!

WOW!

The engine is designed to come away in an extreme crash, as is much of the rest of the car. It is to dissipate the energy that the car has during the crash. What you saw was supposed to happen.

Matt

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That was the nastiest crash I ever saw.

As Mat said, in some ways, with the cars effectively designed to "disintegrate" (for want of a better word) in a controlled fashion, sometimes they look a lot worse now. A lot worse than two that stick in the memory - Gerhard Berger at Imola in 1989, and Senna on the same curve in 1994...

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What is known is that the front right tire with attached suspension piece became loose on impact, hit Senna on the head and pierced his visor, causing the fatal trauma. Images of Senna's battered helmet indicate that some sort of puncture had occurred at the top of the visor, just over his right eye. This led to the now most commonly accepted theory that one of the car's suspension bars had come loose and impacted with Senna's head.

Now for the conspiracy theorists, he was kept alive so the race was not cancelled and money lost.

The FIA and Italian authorities still maintain that Senna was not killed instantly, but rather died in hospital, to where he had been rushed by helicopter after an emergency tracheotomy and IV administration were performed. There is an ongoing debate as to why Senna was not declared dead at the track. Under Italian law when a person dies at a sporting event, that death must be investigated, causing the sporting event to be cancelled. The Director of the Oporto (Portugal) Legal Medicine Institute, Professor Pinto da Costa, has stated the following: From the ethical viewpoint, the procedure used for Ayrton's body was wrong. It involved dysthanasia, which means that a person has been kept alive improperly after biological death has taken place due to brain injuries so serious that the patient would never have been able to remain alive without mechanical means of support. There would have been no prospect of normal life and relationships. Whether or not Ayrton was removed from the car while his heart was beating or whether his supply of blood had halted or was still flowing, is irrelevant to the determination of when he died. The autopsy showed that the crash caused multiple fractures at the base of the cranium, crushing the forehead and rupturing the temporal artery with haemorrhage in the respiratory passages. It is possible to resuscitate a dead person immediately after the heart stops through cardio-respiratory processes. The procedure is known as putting the patient on the machine. From the medical-legal viewpoint, in Ayrton's case, there is a subtle point: resuscitation measures were implemented.From the ethical point of view this might well be condemned because the measures were not intended to be of strictly medical benefit to the patient but rather because they suited the commercial interest of the organisation. Resuscitation did in fact take place, with the tracheotomy performed, while the activity of the heart was restored with the assistance of cardio-respiratory devices. The attitude in question was certainly controversial. Any physician would know there was no possibility whatsoever of successfully restoring life in the condition in which Senna had been found."

However against the above, when Professor Sid Watkins arrived on the scene, he just went to work to try and save a live. He would not have looked at Senna and said "forget it guys, he is a gonna, go get a shovel.".

Matt

Here's the video for anyone who wants to see it.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=j5QT2V-OCXs

Ouch.