SATURDAY REPORT
First of all i apologise for no friday report literally nothing happened that was interesting enough to write about so i'll write about saturday.
Ok you guys who read this will have to understand that i'm very upset about what happened today. For people who don't know practice 5 started at 8am arrived at the track 6.15am prepped both cars for another long session ahead. 8am rolled around and it was time for practice. i remember very well going up to Jan (GT4 driver) and giving him a quick pat on the back and wishing him well before he got into the car. Once the cars left the pit lane i went to get changed into race gear presuming nothing would happen and how horribly wrong did i turn out to be.
Whilst getting changed one of the crew members ran into where i was getting changed and said one of our cars had hit the wall hard. I ran out with my suit barely on me to see what had happened and what i saw wasn't good. The car was backwards after the crest on mountain straight on the left hand side of the road. My first though obviously was if the driver was ok, My second though was how the hell did he end up here, I originally though maybe he got caught up in the path of an impatient GT3 car and copped a punt off the road but what i saw would confuse everyone in our garage. In short our car crested the hill and then sort of darted hard to the right and impacted both walls on the right hand side of the car. I had hoped maybe it was just cosmetic damage that could be fixed but as soon as the car arrived at the garage we knew it was done.
The car was put away and after the session ended we checked the car over however their was no chance of that car running tomorrow. I'll now explain how brutal of an accident it was but you'll have to understand certain things have to be kept confidential.
Firstly the right front copped the majority of the damaged the rim was smashed the tyre came off with the hub intact, The rotor was smashed into several pieces, the spring cracked in half, the air hose was ripped apart and heaps more however our downfall was that the chassis was badly bent out of shape and for people who know motor racing well that's game over.
The right rear was also bent badly but the concern was on the inside the dash had collapsed, The mounting to the seat was broken, Our cooling box had a huge hole in it which leaked all the water inside onto electronic wires and worst of all the bolts used to secure the ballast box were bent and also the windscreen was badly smashed. As i said earlier i have to keep certain things quiet but many more things were found that once again can't be talked about.
Sadly the driver hadn't fared well after the accident he climbed out of the car shaken and had the air knocked out of him but we would know the full extent of his injuries later on in the day. His helmet show clear evidence of being thrown around the car most likely when the mounting for the seat broke and after a few hours we found out Jan had been taken to hospital with chest pains. We later found out he had broken 3 ribs with 2 suspected more and a bad cut on his leg when the dash collapsed. He also had neck and back pain happily though this wasn't because of a major injury just because of the impact.
While the car is a right off and it being hard to accept the fact one car won't make the race i have to give respect to the safety that is in Motorsport. Despite the heavy damage the car held itself together pretty well. You have to look at the bigger picture yes it sucks we wrecked a car today but cars can be fixed/replaced whilst people can't be replaced i even said to one of the crew members thank god it wasn't a right hand drive car the injuries could have been similar to Chaz Mostert back in 2015. I ended up visiting Jan in hospital mainly because i wanted to sleep well tonight knowing he was ok he was in high spirits as he usually was during the week so i left happy.
I'll be back tomorrow to be the refuelling assistant on the #76 car and i'm really looking forward to it. I'll have to see if i get so TV time during the broadcast who knows. But that's it for saturday i didn't intend to write an article this long but a lot happened in the day. The only funny part of the day came whilst chilling outside the garage with my race suit on and ended up getting asked for a autograph. Ended up signing some random person's program who thought i was a racing car driver
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Also please like this post if you enjoyed reading it just to give me a rough idea on how many people read it. It would be very much appreciated.
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