IndyCar driver’s family support never wavers
Even after horrible accident, priority was return to the track
TORONTO Jeremy and Arlene Hinchcliffe were hunched over their kitchen counter in Turks and Caicos, inside their vacation property on the tiny group of islands southeast of the Bahamas.
It was mid-May, more than a year ago. Using their smartphones, the Oakville, Ont., husband and wife had been watching their son, racecar driver James Hinchcliffe, run a practice session in preparation for the famed Indianapolis 500, some 2,400 km and an ocean away.
All was fine. So they stopped watching. They left the kitchen.
“As we’re walking, Jeremy gets a phone call from someone who says, ‘How’s James? What do you know?’” Arlene said, recalling the beginning of a life-altering 24 hours.
The parents of Canada’s top IndyCar driver soon learned their son had been involved in a crash. They didn’t know to what extent, and, with the understanding that collisions are a regular occurrence in the high-risk sport and often amount to bumps to bruises, they remained relatively calm while trying to find out what was going on. Still, according to Arlene, there was a worrisome amount of “radio silence.”
If there was minor concern up to that point, it became a gut-wrenching emotional thunderstorm when IndyCar officials called to say they were sending out a private jet to transport them to Indianapolis.
“‘This is serious,’ ” Arlene recalled thinking at that moment. “Mother’s instinct took over — this was more than a flesh wound. We’ve got to get off the island right now.” It was serious.
The sun was shining at the famous Brickyard when James Hinchcliffe’s No. 5 Schmidt Peterson Motorsports Honda fell victim to a mechanical failure. At speeds of more than 200 m.p.h., he drove straight into the Turn 3 wall, striking it hard on the right-front side, skidded across the short chute between turns three and four in a sea of sparks and rolled completely over and back on its wheels before coming to a stop.
It wasn’t an incredibly spectacular crash by comparison to some others, but the Canadian driver’s injuries were instantly terrifying.
A steel suspension wishbone came loose and penetrated the cockpit, entering — and exiting — his right leg, then his upper-left thigh and continuing to his pelvic region, pinning him in the car and essentially turning Hinchcliffe into a shish-kebab.
The safety crew worked at mesmerizing speeds — by all accounts, the timely actions of the first responders that day saved Hinchcliffe’s life — to extract him from the car and transport him to hospital. Indy is the closest track to a Level 1 trauma centre of anywhere on the loop and that proved essential, given that Hinchcliffe was in danger of bleeding to death.
He was immediately hooked up to a transfusion machine once inside the hospital, to pump a total of 22 pints of blood back into him and went on the operating table to have the artery that had been struck in his leg sealed, one of two surgeries performed.
Hinchcliffe, who sustained a concussion, does not remember any of it. His parents, though, remember every moment.
“The whole trip home, I’m literally looking out into the darkness,” Arlene said, recalling their overnight flight to Indianapolis. “Very foreboding.
“My biggest regret is that I wasn’t there,” Arlene added, unprompted. “I could have been there.”
Both Arlene and Jeremy have been part of their son’s career from the beginning, with mom being “member No. 1 of the fan club, absolutely,” according to James, while his father served as his business manager for 18 years, encouraging their youngest son to follow his racing dreams.
So it should come as no surprise that quitting has never been mentioned, not even after a crash that nearly cost James his life. Shortly after re-gaining consciousness, the self-proclaimed Mayor of Hinchtown let his intentions be known.
“One of the very first things I said was, ‘When can I get back in a race car?’ I had to use a pen and paper to write that down, because I couldn’t speak yet,” Hinchcliffe said.
Among Arlene’s first words to her son upon arriving at the hospital?
“OK, we’re going to get you back in that car,” the driver’s mom said, adding she remains steadfast in her belief that the safety precautions taken by IndyCar officials make the sport “safer than driving down the QEW,” referring to the busy highway west of Toronto.
Since the crash more than a year ago, an immediately curious Hinchcliffe has watched replays of what happened and spoken to doctors, drivers and family members to try to gain a better understanding about what happened.
He doesn’t have “mental scars” from the incident, but his rehabilitation, which included missing the remainder of last season, was made possible with his parents’ love and assistance. They stayed with him in Indianapolis for more than a month after he was released from hospital. “They gave up everything. Neither waver in their support,” James said. “They never let any fears of what I am doing filter down to me. It’s got to be tough for parents when their kid goes through something like that and he wants to get right back to it.”
The 29-year-old, who has four Verizon IndyCar wins to his name, came full circle two months ago by winning the pole position for the 100th running of the Indy 500, the same track he nearly died on one year before. His parents were there and they will be in attendance at the Honda Indy Toronto this weekend, keeping alive James’ streak of being at every Indy event held in Toronto since his first one, when he was 18 months old. He did not race in last year’s event, but was there as a hometown ambassador.
That Hinchcliffe is here at all is a miracle, according to his mom.
“He certainly had an angel over his shoulder that day,” she said.