Even the best can have bad days
RALLY DRIVING may seem counter-intuitive for a professional risk assessor, but Stuart Scoular, who lost his leg in a shocking accident in New Zealand, would disagree.
The road was straight but undulating and Stuart Scoular and his co-driver and brother, Bret, were doing nearly 200kmh in their Subaru WRX STI.
This being a Targa rally in New Zealand, Scoular had not driven the section of road, nor did his codriver have pace notes. New Zealand Targas, which are held on tarmac, are raced ‘‘blind’’.
The sharp left-hander was on to them quickly, Stuart washed off as much speed as possible, the turn tightened and two wheels strayed off the tarmac. Something that might happen a couple of times a day.
But this particular turn had a large culvert running underneath with solid concrete edging.
‘‘I thought we had made the corner and I was actually looking down the road to the next corner,’’ Stuart says, ‘‘but instead we just stopped. From 150kmh to zero in 1.5 metres.’’
The concrete block stopped only half the car. Bret Scoular’s half went 1.5 metres further.
‘‘We were conscious and I said to my brother ‘Are you OK?’ ‘I think I have a broken leg or two’,’’ Stuart recalls. ‘‘I lent forward to see what happened and Bret said to me: ‘Mate, don’t look down.’ ’’
Stuart looked; his right leg was severed below the knee. ‘‘The concrete had come through the driver’s footwell and I’d effectively had a traumatic foot amputation. My brother had broken ribs and a sore tailbone.’’
As well as losing his foot, Stuart had two burst fractures in his back, a pelvis broken in two places, a broken left leg and ankle, and a broken right thigh. The accident happened last June and since then he has undergone multiple operations.
But just six months later, having hoisted himself out of a wheelchair in the Sydney offices of PwC, where he is a financial services partner, Stuart Scoular tells The Weekend Financial Review it is not the trauma of the crash that sticks in his mind.
‘‘I remember, in that sort of hazy moment when you are coming out of anaesthetic, when you can hear talking but you don’t quite know what’s happening, the surgeon speaking to me,’’ he says in a calm and steady voice.
‘‘He was saying ‘Stuart can you feel this? Can you move this?’ The drive shaft of the car had almost cut the sciatic nerve of my left leg and so they were worried because that would have meant no control of that leg or, worse, an amputation.’’
Not only that, but a piece of wood came flying through the windscreen, narrowly missing both occupants.
‘‘So really, we both came within inches of being killed,’’ Scoular reflects. ‘‘The surgeon said to me ‘Stuart, I have some bad news – you have been in a serious car accident. You have lost your lower right leg’. I remember clearly at that point thinking ‘actually, that’s not that bad’. So my first response was positive. I think that was very important to where I am today.’’
Where he is today is back at work, in a wheelchair for the moment while his broken leg heals. Scoular has recovered strongly after eight weeks in hospital in New Zealand and more operations and bone grafts in Australia. He has worked through what he refers to as one of the darkest parts of his recovery. Having progressed from wheelchair to a crutch, the bone graft on his left leg failed to take and a supporting metal plate, not designed to take his full weight, broke in October.
‘‘The plate obviously gave way over time and my foot was moving very strangely – which wasn’t a surprise when we saw the X-ray,’’ he says. ‘‘That was actually the darkest period because I thought I had lost three months in my recovery.’’
Scoular is quick to credit the assistance he has had from his fellow competitors and rally organisers, medical staff, his employer – and PwC clients – and his family. And he wants to race again.
Nevertheless, Scoular is not an adrenaline junkie, despite the risks of his chosen sport. Indeed, he is a risk assessment professional.
He insists: ‘‘I dot my ‘i’s; I understand how to evaluate risks and part of that is accepting that sometimes things just don’t go to plan. But I am a conservative driver, our car had all the safety equipment and the Targa is a very well-run event with all the appropriate safety measures.’’
Scoular, indeed, precisely matches the personality profile of the professional risk taker: what he does is measure and mitigate risk, not directly avoid it.
According to Michael Collins of Talent Solutions, a former paratrooper and psychologist researching high-performance leadership, two fundamental qualities of successful executives are the ability to comprehend risk and regulate emotion when it increases.
‘‘What you find is that executives believe they have measured the risk, they understand it and so they are prepared for it. Understanding the risk allows them to operate as if the activity is not that risky,’’ he says.
As Scoular says, his car had all the appropriate safety modifications, roll bars, fire equipment, professional servicing. ‘‘We have helmets, fire suits, boots and gloves, a HANS [head and neck support system]. I am very competitive but not reckless. I think that [outlook] has all been critical to my recovery.’’