By Michael Cunningham
Sun-Sentinel
Copyright 2007 Sun-Sentinel Company
All Rights Reserved
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — These days Steve Olvey, formerly a trackside physician at the Indianapolis 500, is at the race more as an observer than medical provider.
He can watch Sunday’s race knowing that, thanks to advances in motor sports safety and medicine that he helped develop, the chances of a driver dying in a crash are much lower now than just 10 years ago.
“Fatalities are very rare now,” said Olvey, an associate professor in the Department of Neurological Surgery at the University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine. “A driver can expect to drive and be competitive for a number of years and retire gracefully and not be crippled.”
That’s a far different outlook from when Olvey started working in motor sports medicine.
In 1966, Olvey’s first year as a trackside physician at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, there was no ambulance or intensive care specialist on site and little was known about the nature of injuries due to high-speed collisions. Olvey said about 1 in 7 drivers involved in high-speed crashes in the 1960s died.
Now it’s common for major racing circuits to have several advanced ambulances, a helicopter for rapid transit to area trauma centers and more than 100 medical personnel. Dr. Hugh Scully, the director of the International Council of Motorsports Sciences, said the organization requires that medical personnel be experienced in advanced life-support and trauma treatment.
Major events now have mobile intensive care and surgery units, and racing circuits have traveling medical teams. Response time has dwindled; Scully said at the Champ race in Toronto, it takes seven minutes to transport drivers from the accident scene to the nearest full trauma center.
The improved medical care and technological advances, everything from drivers’ helmets to car design to track barriers, have reduced fatalities. Scully said the chances of drivers dying in a high-speed crash now are about 1 in 360 despite the higher speeds obtained by modern race cars.
“Over the last couple decades, it’s become incredibly safer,” said Dr. Jeff Grange, the director of emergency medical services at Loma Linda (Calif.) University Medical Center and medical director for California Speedway. “Now it makes news when someone dies.”
Traditionally, it takes a popular driver’s death to spur advances in motor sports safety. Tragedies, such as the death of stock car driver Dale Earnhardt in 2001, provoke a public outcry for improved safety.
Olvey and Terry Trammell, a former orthopedic consultant to the Indy speedway, sought to be more proactive in the 1980s. Mirroring the work of Dr. Sidney Watkins in Formula 1, Olvey and Trammell published the first scientific paper on motor sports injuries in 1984.
Previously, Olvey said many of the improvements in safety had been obvious changes based more on “gut feelings.”
“That [paper] kind of started this whole group of professionals -- engineers, car constructors, doctors -- looking at it scientifically,” Olvey said. “It doesn’t only benefit motor sports. If we understand how people get injured at high velocity, it is important for highway safety, aircraft safety and the military.”
Olvey said real-world concerns prompted General Motors to put crash recorders in its race cars in 1993. GM noticed that race car drivers routinely survived crashes that were far worse than fatal accidents in passenger cars.
The crash recorders provide valuable scientific data about impacts, allowing the study of high-impact crashes with computer models. Soon, Formula 1 and the Indy car series put crash recorders in their cars. NASCAR followed after Earnhardt’s death, and Olvey said all the major racing circuits now use the devices.
The technology spills over to the track, too.
Sensors on open-wheel cars alert emergency response personnel to which cars in a pileup have suffered the greatest impact, allowing a triage to be established quickly. Grange said there have been advancements in “telemedicine,” the ability to provide care from a distance. For example, an injured driver’s X-ray can be instantly transmitted to a specialist for review.
Grange’s Loma Linda University Medical Center developed a Mobile Telemedicine Vehicle, an all-terrain unit that allows the expertise of the critical care center to be delivered to remote locations, including the Baja 100 off-road race in the California desert.
“It’s not just [more medical] personnel that’s made it better,” Grange said. “It’s the technology.”
Olvey, 64, an Indianapolis native, has seen better cars and better care in his 40 years in motor sports. He related some of his experiences in his book, Rapid Response: My inside story as a motor racing life-saver.
He opens the book by detailing Alex Zanardi’s crash at a 2001 CART event in Germany. When paramedics climbed into Zanardi’s car, Olvey said they found that Zanardi’s legs had been “not cut off, but ripped off” below the pelvis.
The veins and two major arteries that carry blood to the legs were severed, and Zanardi also had internal injuries. The injury usually results in death due to blood loss within one to three minutes, Olvey said, but paramedics arrived on the scene within 19 seconds and slowed the bleeding.
They brought Zanardi to Olvey at the heliport, and within an hour Zanardi, who had lost 72 percent of his blood, was in Berlin for 61/2 hours of surgery. Zanardi survived and eventually returned to racing using hand controls developed by Olvey and Trammell.
“If he had that particular crash probably four or five years before, he wouldn’t have survived,” said Olvey, the director of the Neuroscience Intensive Care Unit at Jackson Memorial Hospital. “It was a pretty remarkable story that brought together all the advances that have been made in safety and medical care.”