Written by James Allen

great Prof Watkins passes away
Posted on September 12, 2012
XPB.cc

One of F1′s greatest figures has died this evening; Prof Sid Watkins, who was 84, passed away in a hospital in London.

The neurosurgeon from Liverpool, who was brought into F1 by Bernie Ecclestone to improve safety and medical standards, did more than anyone else in that field, getting F1 to the stage where it is today: a highly dangerous sport where accidents are survivable.

Prof Watkins was for 26 years the FIA medical delegate and introduced correct extraction techniques for getting drivers out of cars after accidents, led moves to improve crash structures and other safety measures and saved the lives of many well known F1 names. He attended to serious accidents for Gerhard Berger, Martin Donnelly, Nigel Mansell and Mika Hakkinen among others as well as the fatal accidents of Gilles Villeneuve and Ayrton Senna, who was a close personal friend.

The Prof features prominently in the documentary film “Senna”, released last year. He appeared late last year along with the film makers on the panel which met with BAFTA voters and had a major hand in the film winning the 2011 BAFTA for best documentary.

But he also saved less well known people. In the early 1990s, I was on a long haul flight back from a Grand Prix when a man unconnected with racing collapsed in the downstairs deck of a BA 747. A group of us went in search of the Prof, finding him upstairs on the Business Class deck. Sid woke up immediately, came downstairs and performed a tracheotomy on the man, saving his life.

He began work in F1 in 1978, with the death of Ronnie Peterson one of the first tragedies he encountered which made him push for better medical facilities.

The 2000s were the first decade of the sport where not a single F1 driver died and the Prof had a big hand in that.

Watkins founded the Brain and Spine Foundation and was the first president of the FIA Foundation, which is dedicated to research in motorsport safety.

Anyone wishing to learn more about the life of the Prof should read “Life at the Limit: Triumph and Tragedy in Formula One.”

 

Already posted this in "Car-Talk"

 

Not everyone visits car talk. IMHO, this belongs here more so than elsewhere.

His contribution to safety I thInk has been one reason why F1 is still around and popular today, else it may have been written off as a blood sport. I wish Senna had listened to him. He lived a full life and gave it his all and his legacy lives on not only in F1 but all other racing series that today have excellent safety standards.

 

I sure hope him and Ayrton are up there fishing together.

Sad day for motorsports

 

Agreed

 

Jackie Stewart calls for a permanent reminder to honor Sid Watkins. Have to say I agree. It is also a good way of highlighting the importance of all those on the sidelines who have helped shape the sport into what it is today. Its not just teams, drivers and engineers but everyone else that makes F1 what it is.

Stewart believes that the invaluable efforts that Watkins made must be acknowledged by those he did so much to help.

"There needs to be something permanently done to recognise his contribution to motorsport, particularly to Formula 1," Stewart told AUTOSPORT.

"These things filter down [to other categories] but had it not been for him in F1 none of that stuff would have been developed.

"Something needs to be done to recognise Sid's long term of office and how much he did for the sport.

"From my point of view I know how difficult it was to create change with all the hassle I went through. There was at least some recognition that something had to be done when I'd finished.

"Sid took it right to where it is today with incredible firmness sometimes. He didn't suffer fools gladly. He would put his foot down. Everybody respected Sid."

Stewart believes that Watkins' contribution to F1 should not be downplayed, as he believes no man had a greater influence in preventing deaths than him.

"He was responsible for more life saving than anyone else, certainly since my day, and he carried it off with the FIA to the point that the governing body then saw the necessity to have Sid permanently. That was influenced heavily by both Bernie [Ecclestone] and Max [Mosley].

"A lot of people are going to miss Sid Watkins. He was at the British Grand Prix, in the paddock, and there was nobody who was negative about him. Like all of us he upset a few folks but it had to be done.

"He wasn't doing it for personal gratification or anything else. He was a genuine man."

 

http://www.formula1.com/news/features/2012/9/13797.html

Obituary - Professor Sid Watkins OBE, 1928-2012 14 Sep 2012
Hungaroring, Budapest, Hungary. 13-15 August 1999. Professor Sid Watkins, FIA Medical Delegate (L to R): Sixth placed Patrick Tambay (FRA) McLaren; Sid Watkins (GBR) Formula One Doctor; James Hunt (GBR) McLaren, who finished the race in seventh position. United States Grand Prix (East), Rd 15, Watkins Glen, USA, 1 October 1978. Sid Watkins (GBR) Ex-FIA Medical Delegate with Michael Schumacher (GER) Ferrari. Formula One World Championship, Rd15, Italian Grand Prix, Preparations, Monza, Italy, 1 September 2005. 2002 Austrian Grand Prix - Race A-1 Ring, Zeltweg, Austria. 12th May 2002. The medical team, led by Professor Sydney Watkins, work on Takuma Sato in his Jordan chassis minutes after his huge accident with Sauber's Nick Heidfeld. 2002 Brazilian Grand Prix, Interlagos, Brazil. 29th - 31st March 2002. Nelson Piquet chats with Professor Sidney Watkins Prof. Sid Watkins, Spa Francorchamps, 24 August 1997 Bernie Ecclestone (GBR), right, chats with F1 surgeon Professor Sid Watkins (GBR). In the background are Mercedes sporting director Norbert Haug (GER) and Gerhard Berger (AUT), BMW sporting director. Monaco Grand Prix, Rd7, Monte Carlo, Monaco. 26 May 200 Professor Sid Watkins (GBR), right of cockpit tends to Takuma Sato (JPN) who has just made high-speed contact with the Sauber of Heidfeld. Austrian Grand Prix, A1-Ring, Austria, 12 May 2002 (L to R): Race winner Ayrton Senna (BRA), McLaren, talks with Professor Sid Watkins (GBR) FIA Safety Delegate. Italian Grand Prix, Rd 13, Monza, Italy, 13 September 1992. Professor Sid Watkins receives a bronze statue on the occasion of his retirement as FIA Institute President. New Delhi, India, December 8, 2011

Sid Watkins was the kindest and most caring person one could ever hope to meet in Formula One racing - or anywhere else for that matter. Moreover, anyone who works in or cares for the sport owes a massive debt to a man who made such a towering commitment and contribution to bringing safety levels to what so many take for granted today.

He was totally honest and forthright - and he got things done. As a medical doctor he had presence and automatically commanded respect, and when he spoke there wasn’t anyone who didn’t stop and listen. ‘Prof’, as he was universally known, spoke from both the heart and the head, and always did so with the considered thought of a man who, as a neurosurgeon, had so often literally had the lives of others in his hands. And he was completely independent in that thought. Not for him political correctness or persuasion. If something needed saying, he would say it.

Back in 1991, when Michael Schumacher had just come on the Formula One scene, he had a massive accident at Suzuka during practice for the Japanese Grand Prix at the 130R corner, which was a serious challenge back then. Prof thought he needed to calm himself down a little and told him: “Michael, you’re a good-looking lad. And if you carry on like this, you’re going to be a good-looking corpse…”

Not long afterwards, Schumacher went out in the spare Benetton B191 and went quicker, for such is the way of race drivers. But many would never have dared to offer such advice in the first place.

In Brazil he once listened to a litany of woes expressed by a world champion well-known for taking a morbid interest in his own medical condition and laying it on thick. After a few minutes, he looked at his subject speculatively and said: “Okay, well that sounds pretty nasty. The first thing we’d better do is give you an enema…” Curiously, the driver’s ills disappeared instantly.

It was when Prof had ignored Nelson Piquet’s blandishments in 1987 after a huge accident at Imola, and refused to let him race, that his full authority became established.

Piquet had crashed backwards into the infamous wall at Tamburello following a tyre failure, and been badly knocked about. But he’d discharged himself from hospital and turned up ready to race. “I said that wasn’t possible because he’d had a head injury and he might have some brain damage. He said that he hadn’t, whereupon I said, ‘Well why have you left your shoe off?’ He was only wearing one. He said that his foot was painful and swollen so he’d let it off.

“I said: ‘Brain damage, foot damage, it doesn’t make any difference. You’re not fit to drive.’ He cried on my shoulder, begged and screamed, but I said to Bernie: ‘If Nelson gets into a car, I’m leaving this circuit.’”

Years later, Piquet admitted that he didn’t feel right until the end of the season.

That was a watershed for Prof and for medicine in the sport. Up until then, a driver who’d been in a big shunt would crawl back into his car and take his chances. Prof had no time for such romantics. If you weren’t fit, you weren’t racing. That weekend there was massive pressure from the circuit organisers, not to mention Piquet and Williams, but he stood firm and a precedent was established, and from then on what Prof said went, as far as medical matters were concerned.

He had always been in love with racing, but first became involved while he was working as Professor of Neurosurgery in Syracuse in the early Sixties. Since Watkins Glen was also in upstate New York, he found himself joining the medical team for the US Grand Prix there in 1962. He took an anaesthetist and an orthopaedic surgeon with him and they worked in primitive conditions, using their own equipment. Back then things were crude when it came to safety.

By 1970 he was working at the London Hospital, and there he was contacted by Dean Delamont of the RAC MSA who, knowing of his work at Watkins Glen, asked him to fulfil similar duties at the British Grand Prix. Previous attempts to provide intensive care for injured drivers - in the form of the Grand Prix Medical Unit instigated by BRM’s Louis Stanley - had met with a lukewarm response from circuit owners, but now Prof once again suggested that the facilities should be provided to take the intensive care unit to the driver should he be trapped in his car. The chief medical officer rejected the idea vehemently.

It took Bernie Ecclestone to see the situation clearly, and in 1978 he visited Prof, feigning a medical condition, and asked if he would be prepared to attend each race as F1’s official medic. Thus began one of the most far-reaching relationships in F1 history.

Over the years Prof was responsible for changing entrenched attitudes. He initiated the availability of full medical care throughout a meeting and in testing, rather than just on race day. Conditions and equipment were upgraded. Training became intensive, and staffing levels increased. At the same time, he worked very closely with the FIA on improving all aspects of safety, from the drivers’ equipment to the cars and circuits themselves. A movement began which would save countless lives as views changed forever on the subject of the expendability of the stars at the very heart of the F1 show.

He was involved very personally at Imola in 1994, in that fateful weekend when Rubens Barrichello narrowly escaped from an horrendous accident, before Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna were killed. He was particularly close to the Brazilian, with whom he had forged a friendship based on mutual respect.

Thereafter, the quest for safety was redoubled, with Prof in the vanguard of changes which, among other things, included making raised cockpit sides and the HANS head and neck support system mandatory. He kept pushing because he cared deeply, not because he sought reward.

“I still think a great deal about Ayrton,” he admitted. “I dream about him a lot. It's one of the problems of old age: you dream more. There are two or three people in my life who have affected me a lot - my father, the neurosurgeon at Oxford with whom I trained, and Senna - and I dream about them constantly. And I hate it, because they're alive and well, and then you wake up, and have to face once more that they're gone.”

Speaking of Imola, he once said: “Given a retrospective choice between a Tamburello or a Senna, I do not believe any sane person would now select the wall.”

It is a lasting tribute to the passionate and compassionate work of this great man that safety standards in Formula One racing - and across motorsport - have never been higher.

 

^ A fitting tribute. Thanks for sharing

I wonder who that world champion is that took a morbid interest in his medical condition - Niki Lauda??

 

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