Raceroom racing experience crashes11/8/2022 ![]() ![]() ![]() He had no real interest in motorsport, but another friend was racing in Formula 3 and the German circuit made for a useful overnight stop on the way back to Vienna. In 1989, a 17-year-old Toto Wolff made a stop at the Nurburgring as he drove home from Amsterdam with a couple of school friends. "The drivers looked like gladiators to me" Sebastian Gollnow/picture alliance via Getty Images That was when Wolff's love affair with the Nurburgring began, and when one of the most successful team principals in F1 history first experienced motorsport. One of his eyes was pointing inward while the other gazed forward and he was displaying multiple symptoms of a heavy concussion.īut to really understand how Wolff - at that time a successful businessman on the brink of making his name in Formula One - found himself in the back of an ambulance questioning whether he could still feel his legs, you have to travel back a further 20 years to 1989. It was only when they thought to look on the other side of the barriers that they discovered Wolff lying there with his helmet and HANS device still on.Īs the 37-year-old regained consciousness it immediately became clear that he needed to go to hospital. The paramedics were initially confused when they arrived at the scene of the accident and found no driver in the wreckage. He briefly stood by the Porsche's open door and removed his gloves before hauling himself over a nearby crash barrier and collapsing unconscious. Wolff has no memory of what happened next but when the sole-surviving onboard camera flickered back into life, it recorded him turning off the engine, unclipping his belts, removing the steering wheel and clambering out of the car. With no marshals at that part of the circuit, the first news of the mangled Porsche came when the only other car on track, an Audi R8 GT3, radioed to report a stretch of debris and mud littering the track for 100 metres after the Fuchsröhre. ![]() Such were the forces involved, that it continued to ping-pong from barrier to barrier for a distance of 250 metres on an uphill section of track before finally coming to a rest near the next chicane. Had it breached the barriers and launched into the trees beyond, Toto Wolff's name would have gone no further than the obituary pages of the next day's Wiener Zeitung, but fortunately the car corrected itself and slid back across the track. Inside the cockpit, all but one of the screws holding the driver's seat in place were ripped from their fixings and the forces involved scrambled the onboard cameras that had been filming the record attempt.įollowing the initial hit, the car ricocheted back across the track, turned on its roof and scraped along the opposing guardrail. In less than a second, the car spun through 180 degrees, smashed into the steel barriers lining the circuit and recorded an impact of 27G. "You had to squeeze your arse cheeks and commit."īut when the tyre let go, there was no level of bravery or skill that could save Wolff. "You really have to put your balls on the dashboard. "In today's GT3 cars it would be easy flat, but back then, in that car, it was not easy flat," the Austrian tells ESPN over a Zoom call 11 years later. Similar acts of bravery would be necessary at a number of points around the Nurburgring's 12.9-mile Nordschleife layout in order to achieve a sub seven-minute lap time, but Fuchsröhre was always going to be one of the most testing corners for both car and driver. The Nurburgring Nordschleife is a 12.9-mile circuit next to the current Grand Prix circuit. Toto Wolff had eased off the throttle at that point of the circuit earlier in the day, but for this lap - the hot lap to end all hot laps - he had made a pact with his right foot not to lift. The Porsche 911 RSR was doing 189mph when the right rear tyre exploded and spat the car into the steel guardrail at the Fuchsröhre compression. In an exclusive interview with ESPN, Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff rewinds the clock to April 15, 2009, and the day he nearly killed himself attempting a new lap record at the Nurburgring's legendary Nordschleife. ![]()
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