PROUDFOOT: Fast And Effective

Le Mans / ALMS

PROUDFOOT: Fast And Effective

"It's long, long periods of boredom, punctuated by brief spurts of adrenaline." That's how John Zilles, IMSA safety coordinator, describes his track job.

Sylvia Proudfoot | Posted November 27, 2010

IMSA's ace safety team is ready to spring into action at a moment's notice. (Dan R. Boyd/ALMS)

"It's long, long periods of boredom, punctuated by brief spurts of adrenaline."

That's how John Zilles, IMSA safety team coordinator, describes his track job. His team is the first on track every morning, last off every evening. They are on duty for every IMSA-sanctioned series session, including the American Le Mans Series, Patrón GTC Challenge, Cooper Tires Prototype Lights, Star Mazda and Atlantic championships. They are alert and vigilant every second that the track is hot.

The 12 team members are trained in emergency response, firefighting and trauma medicine. They know the drivers, teams and cars in every series, the racing fuels and appropriate fire extinguisher for each, the trajectory a loose wheel will take, how to rebuild a tire wall.

"The emergency medicine, the EMS, the firefighting – those are the high-profile things that we do," Zilles said. "But we spend the majority of our time creating a safe environment for the racers, sweeping, stacking tires, checking walls, cleaning up oil spills. While it looks romantic and glamourous running around a track, we spend a heck of a lot more time, a lot of hours, sitting doing nothing and then responding. "

"Doing nothing" isn't quite accurate! During the Petit Le Mans, Zilles and IMSA doctors George Paul and Gregg Summerville were ever-ready for action, belted into their Porsche Cayenne Turbo, watching the track, scanning radio communications, monitoring the video feed on the big screen at turn five. Their teammates, staged in nearby safety vehicles, had the same intent focus.

"We always like to highlight this particular program because we may be the only series that I'm aware of any more that actually will respond an emergency vehicle directly onto a race track that's still racing. Oftentimes, we will be out on the track even before they've gone full-course caution or they've got the cars gathered up, which is why we have this relatively high-performance vehicle," Zilles explained.

"We have to be cognizant of what's happening on the track, stay out of the way of the cars – we're not as fast as race cars. But at the same time, they know that we are going to do something important and the drivers are very, very respectful of this vehicle."

The ability to make split-second decisions in a crisis is perhaps the most important trait shared by the safety crew, all of whom are fulltime firefighters, most also trained paramedics.

"I like to hire firefighters because firefighters are problem-solvers. That's what they do in their everyday jobs; they're used to operating under pressure. They're all eminently qualified to do what they do," Zilles noted. "Dr. George and Dr. Gregg are both emergency room physicians. They see urgent situations all the time."

True, but they don't see anything in a hospital as quickly as they do at the track. That can create a diagnostic challenge.

"In many ways, it's more difficult because a lot of the signs and symptoms that we would normally expect to see in our practice haven't evolved yet, they have not developed yet," Paul explained. "So the driver may appear okay or not voice many complaints at that time because it's too early for those symptoms to develop. We need to evaluate the incident and use that to determine what are the potential hazards that may occur. That is one of the reasons why we take so many drivers to be evaluated at the track medical centre, because we're waiting to see if symptoms develop."

The safety team draw on all their experience, knowledge and instinct to evaluate potential injuries. Summerville is fascinated by physics, another tool he uses to gauge the impact of a crash.

"Everything is new when you arrive, you don't know what's happening, there isn't a textbook that you can go to for the most recent motorsports medicine injuries or crashes. We just make a lot of it up as we go and learn from our past experience," he said.

"You can never judge from the outside how bad a crash is, because there may be a lot of energy transferred to the driver and you just can't make a judgement based on what you see on the track. And something that's really bad could have very little energy transferred to the driver. You just never know."

It's an intricate web at high speed. Zilles has shared his skills around the world, teaching vehicle rescue in more than 40 countries on six continents. He is the first to tell you every input is valuable.

"We always look into it a little bit more and rarely is a decision made by only one member of this team," he said. "It really is a team effort. I honestly think I have the best team working in the business."

Lucky us. I'm grateful the orange-clad team has my back.

Sylvia Proudfoot has seen motorsport from many vantage points. She's worked as a reporter, series media officer, entrant, driver manager, team strategist, event coordinator, logistics administrator and sponsor rep. With stints in open-wheel, stock-car and sports-car racing, she's equally at home at le Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, Daytona International Speedway, Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Nürburgring. Her life before racing spanned political and corporate work, automotive consulting and sports projects including golf, hockey, pro rodeo and the Olympic Games.

The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sylvia Proudfoot

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