Don’t dream it’s over
His mum’s heart could have stopped when she realised something had gone terribly wrong. Alex Peroni, at just 19, had diced with death in a Formula 3 crash at Monza. Just two months later, he is haunted by the prospect of perhaps never racing again — not a
Just before her son’s monumental crash in September, during the Formula 3 race at the Italian Grand Prix, Cathy Peroni was dancing around her Tranmere lounge room celebrating with Percy the family cat. Her son, Alex Peroni, was having his best race of what had been a challenging season for the young Tasmanian. “Zandy Pandy”, as only she calls him, was “on a charge” and in sixth place. His mum was thrilled.
But then, all of a sudden, and with only four laps to go, her heart sank. She put the cat down. “Alex’s name just went off screen and he didn’t come around the track and I immediately knew something was wrong,” Cathy says.
“I was staring at the telly and it seemed like 10 hours ... it felt like such a long time, but it was probably only seconds. And then they showed the crash … I don’t think I was breathing.”
His dad, Piero, was in the pit lane when it happened. He had headphones on so he could hear Alex talking to the engineer. But then there was no response. “We saw his name drop down on the leaderboard,” Piero says. “The engineer kept saying ‘Alex, are you there?’ and he wasn’t responding.
And then someone said: ‘That’s Alex’s car on that pile of tyres’.” Piero looked over and saw that the car’s safety cell was still intact.
“That was a good sign,” his dad tells TasWeekend in the same family lounge room seven weeks since the accident. “It was only after I saw the replay of the crash that I understood the gravity of the situation.”
When the car hit the “sausage” kerb on the exit of what’s called the famous Parabolica corner at the Monza track, Alex says he was driving at about 220km per hour. The car flew several metres into the air and somersaulted twice before landing heavily upside down on top of a trackside tyre barrier.
The orange race car with “Tasmania” emblazoned on its side
then flipped right-side up and came to rest against the safety barrier. The massive impact of both hitting the kerb and the crash landing fractured Alex’s T6 vertebra.
Piero says the “sausage” kerb was removed after the crash, and he’s been told it will never be returned to that corner. “I just think it was an avoidable accident and a totally unnecessary one,” Piero says. “The kerb shouldn’t have been there.”
The governing body of motor sports is investigating. As a result of his accident, the Mexican Grand Prix has just announced it will use electronic controls and sensors on high speed corners.
Alex says he believes his life was saved by the metal bar that was installed above his head, called a halo.
Such devices were only made mandatory in open-wheel race cars a year ago. Alex says he landed directly on his head and — even with the halo in place — his helmet still hit the barrier.
The $10,000 helmet, with its unique artwork by Tasmanian Nathan Fellows, is sitting on a sideboard across from him during our interview. It’s just been put into a perspex display case in the hope someone will part with at least $10,000 for the privilege of owning it, so Alex can buy a new one. The dings and dents from the force of the impact are easy to see.
Alex says he has only one memory from the moment after impact. It is a single frame in his mind, a vision of some trees. Then nothing.
Just like his mother, who was pacing up and down at home, the motorsport community right around the world held its breath after watching the crash live on television.
It had already been a very difficult week. Just seven days earlier, 22-year-old Formula 2 driver Anthoine Hubert died after a collision at the Belgian Grand Prix.
Cathy lifts her hand up to her face as she finishes recounting the torture of waiting for her husband’s phone call. She says even before the race went bad she was unusually agitated and didn’t know why.
Even Percy the cat (who has since died) was out of sorts, she says, and instead of going outside like he normally did he stayed by her side as she waited for news. Alex’s sister Ellen rushed home from ten-pin bowling to be with her mum.
It was only parental premonition, Cathy says, that prompted them to buy a ticket for Piero to travel to Italy so that he could be by his son’s side and support him for that particular race.
She slowly shakes her head and looks over at Alex who is sitting on the lounge, smiling back at her and hugging a cushion. Piero is beside her in his own chair.
Alex is visibly moved by his mother’s tears. “It was tough for all of us,” Alex says. “You don’t realise how it’s going to affect everyone else.”
Alex walks into the room for our interview a few minutes after his parents start telling me about his accident. Ellen is sitting in the next room with papers strewn all over the dining room table and headphones on, studying for her university accounting exams.
She’s putting herself through her economics and marketing degree and working as well — because all the family money has been spent on Alex’s racing career.
They’ve recently had to re-mortgage their house after one of Alex’s sponsors dropped out. Formula 3 drivers don’t get paid.
Alex has done a stack of media since his crash, and has had interview requests from media organisations all over the world — including the television program Good Morning America. In the first 48 hours after the accident, the vision of his crash had been viewed two million times.
He slides open the lounge room glass doors, gives us all a big, toothy grin and carefully slumps onto the sofa. Within seconds, the 19 year-old is being berated for wearing well-worn socks with multiple holes in the toes and soles.
His response is a cheeky laugh as he points out that they are, at least, clean.
Alex Peroni may have beaten the sons of millionaires — and at least one billionaire — to win prestigious Formula 3 races at some of the trickiest tracks in the world, including last May at the Monaco Grand Prix and three out of four times at what is considered the world’s most technically difficult track in Pau, France — but this young Tasmanian is down-to-earth and instantly likeable in his much-loved ankle socks, an old fleecy jumper and corduroy pants.
In 2006, he won at the Mugello circuit in Tuscany twice, before becoming the youngest Australian to win a single-seater championship in Europe. After winning at Monaco he was invited to attend the Prince of Monaco’s black tie ball for all the winners. Alex had to rush out and buy a tux before adding another first to his list: the only former Fish Frenzy employee to party with the Prince.
Following our interview, he and his girlfriend Beatrice are borrowing Cathy’s old Ford Fiesta and driving to his grandmother’s Dodges Ferry shack for a few days.
It’s like Alex lives on a different planet to his fellow Formula 3 racing drivers, most of whom have a lifestyle akin to the rich and famous. His spinal fracture is the first serious injury Alex has endured since he started racing go karts when he was seven. At that time, his dad says, he was about as big as the helmet he had to put on his head.
His motorsport racing career started when he was 15. It was then he relocated to Europe for nine months each year, initially living with his grandparents in Italy.
Even as a four-year-old, Alex was spellbound by the world of racing, and recalls being entranced for hours watching his dad’s VHS videos of rally and Formula 1.
“I fell in love with the speed and wanted to be like Michael Schumacher,” he tells me. Piero took him to the Baskerville track at Old Beach when he was four, and sat him on the roof of the car so he had a good view of the racing cars flying by. “He was tiny and I stood next to him and he didn’t move for six hours,” Piero says. “The guy who was parked next to us told me he’d never seen a kid sit still for so long.”
Alex says he remembers the sound of the cars and the smell of burning fuel and the atmosphere. He was hooked. The track became his “happy place”.
“The sound is incredible,” Alex says. “It vibrates right through your whole body like music.”
People who don’t follow motor sports may not understand that the professionals who drive these fast cars are in fact elite athletes who follow gruelling training sessions every day to mentally and physically prepare their minds and body for the sport. At the time of our interview, it is 50 days since Alex has been wearing the back brace. He is hopeful it may be removed around his birthday at the end of this month.
He may be able to start training again by mid-December because the testing in Europe starts in February for the first races of the season, which kick off in March.
A few days ago Alex should have been racing at the Macau Grand Prix, which is the ultimate for Formula 3 drivers. To miss out on that race, he says, is gut-wrenching.
But it’s not just his physical injuries that need to heal, says the soon-to-be 20-year-old.
The crash also has taken a toll mentally. He’s never before missed out on races before because of injury.