Formula 1: The GOAT

“OH MY GOD!” That was the collective reaction from the people in the grandstand, having seen it happen right in front of their eyes. Worry and fear filled them, increasing more and more as Fatih didn’t move, even after a few seconds, unlike his first crash, where he had immediately moved and attempted to rejoin the track.

All of those who knew anything about motorsports understood that it always came with a certain degree of danger, but the safety systems had come a long way from the past, where a driver dying in a race was not too much of a surprise. It had reached the point that many people seemed to have almost forgotten about the dangers. But at that moment, all of those on the track started fearing and even considering that as a possibility upon seeing the scale of the crash that had even moved the tire walls a considerable distance, and the driver in the kart was not moving at all.

……..

“FATIH!” Rümeysa and Güldane nearly shouted in unison as their hearts dropped. They turned, leaving the grandstand and trying to go onto the track to personally check on him themselves. Despite their minds knowing that it was going to be impossible for them to do that, it didn’t matter to them as they were intent on doing everything in their power to get to him.

“STOP! You can’t do that!” one of the track marshals, who was responsible for making sure no one from the grandstands entered the track, moved into a T-position in front of them, blocking the gate to the track behind him as they tried to move around him.

“He is my son! He might be injured! I have to check on him!” Rümeysa said, feeling all sorts of emotions that had overridden her usually very logical mind.

Among the two, she could be said to be feeling the worst. She was the one who had supported Fatih in this hobby despite knowing the danger, and she was now coming to the realization that she might have sent her own son to his death. And although Güldane, his grandmother, was not thinking exactly that, she too was feeling a similar guilt for not having stopped it. Had they been calm and thought the whole thing through, they would have realized that it was not their fault, but that part of their brain was not really in a position to raise its hand.

As they struggled, they suddenly stopped when the marshals who had run to Fatih the moment the race was red-flagged raised their hands, calling for the medics who were coming to hurry, who immediately rushed in the direction of Fatih with their first aid boxes. This deepened the fear they were feeling as their imaginations went to the worst possible outcome. In response, Güldane lost the power in her legs and was caught by the marshal as she was falling, while Rümeysa squatted with her hands on her head.

They were experiencing one of the worst days of their lives.

……..

Two minutes ago.

Fatih could immediately feel that his situation was dire. The pain in his chest had intensified from the initial broken rib after landing on the same side. Worst of all, he could clearly feel that his left hand was broken or dislocated, as he couldn’t control it.

“Uhhhh… Uhhh…” As he used his right hand to raise his visor, the marshal who arrived at the scene could hear his labored breathing. It sounded as if he was trying to fill a balloon that someone else was pressing from the outside. He was also fumbling with his right hand to open his racing suit; it wasn’t the first time he’d experienced this, having gone through something similar in the simulation.

It was a lung puncture, most likely caused by his broken rib. As a result, air had escaped from the lung into his chest cavity. With everything inside tightly packed, the only space the air could take was the one normally occupied by his expanding lung. Once the left lung is compressed, the escaped air fills the space, preventing it from re-expanding. This drastically reduced the amount of air he could inhale. No matter how hard he tried to breathe, it didn’t feel like enough air was getting in.

“Are you okay?” one of the marshals asked.

Fatih laboriously shook his head. At the same time, he continued trying to open his suit. Normally, the trapped air from a lung puncture would remain localized, but the rib protector he was wearing was preventing that. As a result, the air was now moving into other areas of his body.

Once the medics arrived, they saw Fatih trying to open his suit and immediately understood something was wrong there. One took a pair of scissors from the first aid box and started cutting the suit over his chest, revealing the rib protector. They cut through that as well, revealing his fireproof underwear, which they also cut through, this time more carefully, as his skin was next.

“It’s a pneumothorax!” one of the medics shouted the moment he saw Fatih’s chest and heard his strained breathing.

He immediately received a 14-gauge needle from the second medic, who had moved the moment he heard the diagnosis. The first medic used his left hand to locate the second intercostal space in the mid-clavicular line, between the second and third ribs. He placed his fingers on each rib, leaving a space, and carefully inserted the needle, puncturing the skin.

A HISSSSSSSSSS sound was heard as the air that had escaped the lung into his body was released. The relief could be heard in Fatih’s breathing as he went from short, desperate gasps to finally being able to take a full breath. The simple procedure had instantly relieved the pressure and stabilized his condition.

The medic removed the needle but left the hollow catheter in place to allow for continued air escape during transport to the hospital.

They then immediately moved to remove his helmet while another medic fitted a neck brace. They performed a full spinal immobilization, moving him as a single unit onto a stretcher before finally attending to his non-urgent injury, splinting his arm, and placing it on top of him.

While they had been administering first aid, the ambulance had already entered the track, cutting across the grass. The medics, with the help of the marshals, raised the stretcher onto a wheeled gurney and pushed it to the ambulance, which immediately left for Ospedale Vito Fazzi, the largest hospital in the Lecce province, equipped for emergency and trauma care.

……..

During the entire process, the track had been eerily silent as everyone watched the medics go through all the motions: cutting the race suit, inserting the needle, and finally getting Fatih into the ambulance before it left.

Ricky Flynn had already gone to Fatih’s family and was heading with them to the parking lot to get his rental car and follow the ambulance to the hospital. Steve was left in charge of dealing with the aftermath of everything related to the crash and the race.

The drivers, who had been watching everything unfold from the pit lane, found themselves shaking, knowing that it could have been any of them. They had small conversations among themselves, trying to make sense of the situation and calm their nerves.

“Do you think that puncture was a result of the first crash?” Stan Pex asked his brother, who was with him.

“I think so, since the side it happened on was the one that hit the wall in the first crash,” his brother agreed. He was confident that the tires were most likely not changed if the damage wasn’t visible, as the racing official monitoring the repairs would have only approved work on the parts that required it to maintain fairness. They wouldn’t have seen a small problem in the tire, which was then exaggerated by Fatih pushing the kart to its limits, resulting in it giving up and exploding.

“Do you think he will be fine?” Alessio Lorandi, who had raced with Fatih the most among all the drivers in the race, having started when they were in the KF Junior category, found himself asking his brother, Leonardo.

“From their reactions, it seemed urgent, so I’m not sure, though I hope he is,” Leonardo said, patting Alessio on his back to try and calm him, but also to calm himself. The fifteen-minute race restart announcement had already gone up, meaning they needed to recollect and refocus themselves to go back to racing just minutes after seeing such a large crash. Had it been another driver, they could have chalked it up to a mistake or something like that, but the one who had the crash was the best driver on the track, meaning it might be something they could experience on the same track, making it a very difficult situation for them to be in.