Ayello: Robert Wickens gearing up for fight he can win after Pocono crash
LONG POND, Pa. — For Robert Wickens, the days, weeks and months ahead will be among the most challenging of his life.
While it is a relief that the injuries the Schmidt Peterson Motorsports rookie sustained during Sunday’s vicious crash at Pocono Raceway were not life-threatening, the damage Wickens’ body absorbed in the wreckage was significant.
IndyCar announced late Sunday that the 29-year-old Canadian was admitted to Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest in Allentown with injuries to both of his legs, his right arm and spine, along with a bruised lung. The series announced Monday afternoon that Wickens is scheduled to undergo surgery for a spinal injury Monday night.
The road to recovery will be onerous, physically punishing and mentally exhausting. Yet there is reason to believe Wickens can come out the other side of this.
If I’ve learned anything in 18 months on the IndyCar beat, it’s that racecar drivers are not built like the rest of humanity. They are simply wired differently.
Week in and week out, they willingly place their lives in peril with the calculated reckless abandon that is required of them to do their jobs. Every time they strap into the cockpit, they know it could be the last time they do so.
Yet they do it day after day, even after gut-wrenching wrecks like Sunday's or after tragedies like those of Dan Wheldon, who died in a crash at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 2011, and Justin Wilson, who was killed after being struck in the head by debris as another driver crashed at Pocono Raceway in 2015.
That's because the racing is in their blood. They live for the competition and the thrill of hanging it all on the line. That is what drives them every weekend on the race track and what motivates them to do everything they can to get back in a car when they're forced away from one.
Consider the examples of just the past 18 months. Scott Dixon fearlessly returned to a racecar a week after a death-defying wreck in last year's Indianapolis 500. Few thought Sebastien Bourdais would climb back into a cockpit again in 2017 after his horrific crash during Indy 500 qualifying, yet there he was, running around the oval Gateway Motorsports Park a couple of months later. Meanwhile, Pietro Fittipaldi’s resilience these past few months after breaking both of his legs during a sports car race in Belgium has been inspirational.
With Wickens entering IndyCar this year, I’ve only had the pleasure of getting to know him over the past six months or so. However, during our interactions, what has always stood out to me is his relentlessness. He is a tireless worker who seems to thrive on being told what he cannot do.
We do not yet know the full extent of his injuries, but my best guess is that whatever timeline or limitations doctors put on him, he will best them.
I feel more confident in making that prediction knowing the support group he has around him. I can think of no collection of people more equipped to help him work through what is certain to be an arduous journey than the folks at Schmidt Peterson Motorsports. Two of the faces of that organization are living testaments to strength and resilience in the face of overwhelming adversity.
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First, of course, there is team owner Sam Schmidt. This is a man who saw his father become partially paralyzed from an off-road racing accident; who broke both of his feet in a 1999 crash in Texas; who became paralyzed from the neck down after a 2000 wreck at Walt Disney World Speedway in 2000, yet none of that could keep him away from the race track. In fact, none of it could even keep him off the track.
Just last year, Schmidt took to the oval at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where he raced the great Mario Andretti in a pair of Corvette Z06s controlled only by head motions, breathing devices and voice commands.
Then there's Wickens' best friend, James Hinchcliffe. The racing gods keep telling that guy to find another profession, and he's just too damn stubborn to listen.
First it was the piece of debris that conked him in the helmet in 2014, leaving him with a concussion and a reason to fear a return to racing. But he did anyway, and a year later, his resilience was again put to the test when a crash at IMS resulted in a piece of his car piercing the lower half of his body, turning him into, as he so eloquently put it, "a human kabob." That terrifying crash nearly killed him and would have kept a less courageous soul from ever wanting to climb into cockpit of a racecar again. Yet, there he was a year later winning the pole at Indy, and a year after that, conquering Long Beach to complete his miraculous comeback.
You see, quitting isn't in this team's nature.
I wholeheartedly believe that Robert Wickens will be the next in line at SPM to defy the odds and one day return to the race track. I believe that there's at least a small part of him thinking about his comeback from his hospital bed. And I believe that if there's ever so much as a shadow of a doubt that creeps into his mind, his friends, family and incredible team will be there to guide him through it.