Frank Coztansa wrote:
JFC.
Were those body parts in the still pics?
https://canoe.com/sports/auto-racing/wh ... -crash/amp"WHERE ARE ALEX'S LEGS?': Witnesses recall Zanardi's horrific crashDAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — The medical team had no idea where to even find injured driver Alex Zanardi as they raced toward the scene of his crash at the EuroSpeedway Lausitz in Klettwitz, Germany.
The debris field stretched out for hundreds of yards on the grey pavement and the carnage looked like a war scene straight out of the movies.
Dr. Terry Trammell hopped out of the safety vehicle and tried running toward Zanardi but immediately slipped and fell. He assumed he slid in oil and was stunned to see it was actually Zanardi’s blood pouring down the banking in a pool so slick Trammell had to crawl on his knees to the injured driver.
We didn’t know what had happened, if it was an accident, a bomb — it could have been a bomb blast for all we knew,” Trammell said.
It was four days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks 4,000 miles away in the United States. The CART Series was racing because the teams were stranded in Europe, there was no way to get back to the U.S. and racing as scheduled had been an emotionally draining decision. There was concern the series could be targeted, but the German host committee said it was safe to race.
Now, in the waning laps, one of the most popular drivers in motorsports had spun out exiting pit road and his car was hit straight on by another driver.
Trammell remembers an eerie silence as he waded through blood and car parts to get to Zanardi’s sheared cockpit.
I got there, I asked, ‘Where are Alex’s legs?”‘ said Trammell. “Your mind says one thing and the eye says something else. You are looking and something just wasn’t right. His legs were not there, it was almost in slow motion and it was deathly quiet. It was perfectly clear, no sound at all.”
Both legs had been severed above the knee and were blown to pieces all over the track. Zanardi was bleeding to death and Trammell and CART’s renowned safety team had just minutes to act and get the two-time series champion into a helicopter and on his way to a trauma unit in Berlin.
Open-wheel racing is inherently one of the more dangerous disciplines and the drivers in the field have suffered their share of loss over the years. Greg Moore, a rising superstar, had been killed two years earlier in a crash in California and many still mourned the beloved Canadian. Now they saw another horrific crash scene, the safety crew’s frenetic pace and there was silence on their radios.
The drivers begged for updates.
“I was told that he was gone. I was told wrongly,” said former teammate Jimmy Vasser. “Tony Kanaan and I believed he had died for a very short period of time.”
Zanardi went into cardiac arrest on the helicopter ride to Berlin and spent days in a medically induced coma. He was 34, one of the top drivers in the world, and awoke without either of his legs.
He immediately turned toward rebuilding his life and in the 17 years since has become a world-renowned hand cyclist and Paralympic gold medallist. His next challenge is the Rolex 24 at Daytona, a twice-round-the-clock endurance race in which Zanardi will compete without his prosthetic legs and use a steering wheel designed for him to compete using only hand levers.
Zanardi’s accident led to the creation for safety teams a kit of medical supplies to be used in traumatic injuries. Known as the “Zanardi Kit,” it was on the truck when safety workers stopped James Hinchcliffe from bleeding to death from a punctured artery in a crash at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 2015.
DR. TERRY TRAMMELL
“I was able to create a compression dressing on the right leg out of his firesuit and managed that for a tourniquet and used the belt to tourniquet the left stump but I couldn’t keep it on. It was like trying to put a band on a funnel. We just had to get him to the helicopter. We got to Berlin, and somewhere in all of that, someone handed me a plastic bag and said, ‘You asked for this.’ I was like, ‘I did?’ Well, it was his legs. It was all the pieces. The bag was X-rayed and then it went to the morgue. That was the first time the enormity of it all hit me, when I saw all the pieces in the bag, the body pieces that were not part of him anymore.”
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Right especially since half the guys here had him dead. I thought he was.
