In 2011, when a crash in the Malaysian Grand Prix at Sepang claimed Marco Simoncelli’s life, the spotlight followed a distraught Valentino Rossi.
To Rossi, Simoncelli was a fellow Italian and a great friend to boot.
As Simoncelli lost his balance, fell and slid, he was hit by two motorcycles that were trailing him. One of them was ridden by Rossi. For Rossi, this fact gave an unbearable sting to the loss. Rossi could not have avoided ploughing into his friend, but the image will plague him forever.
Death on the race track is always a lurking possibility, even in our times when racing safety has all the trappings of applied science. However, whenever it happens, it seems to take the racing fraternity by choking surprise, sometimes coaxing intense reactions out of the surviving racers.
Here, I am presenting two separate motor racing accidents, for two reasons. Firstly, these cases are out of the ordinary. The other reason is topicality. The death anniversary of one of the victims, Jim Clark, was recently observed (April 7) and the birth anniversary of the other, Tom Phillis, has just arrived (April 9).
Though these two real-life dramas revolve around their deaths, Clark and Phillis are only second-line actors. It’s their friends — also racers — who top the dramatis personae.
Australian motorcycle racer Tom Phillis is today remembered as the man who pushed the limits at the TT mountain circuit. With a motorcycle powered by a pushrod engine, he clocked over 100 mph. Until he did so, none had breached this speed barrier with such a motorcycle. His was a promising career, which came to a premature end with a fatal crash in 1962 at the Isle of Man TT.
Shaken up to the roots, Phillis’ friend Gary Stuart Hocking, a legend in his own right, having reigned as world champion in 350cc and 500cc classes, turned his back on motorcycle racing. Hocking, who was Rhodesian, felt he owed this to someone who was more of a brother than a friend.
Hocking, however, did not walk away from it all: he went into car racing. And here’s what shovels coal into the notion that life is crazier than fiction. A few months after his best buddy’s death, Hocking met his own on the race track. While practising with his Lotus 24 ahead of a race, Hocking lost control of the machine and rolled and tumbled multiple times to his death.
In the other incident, which occurred in 1968 during a Formula Two race in Germany, Jim Clark, Formula One racer from Britain, rammed a stand of trees as his Lotus 48 went berserk due to deflation of a rear tyre.
Clark’s death is reported to have deeply affected his Lotus teammate and best friend Graham Hill, a charismatic personality and a legend with two Formula One titles to his credit.
Hill responded to the tragedy more positively than Hocking did. It seemed to have pumped more adrenaline into Hill’s veins and added more horsepower to his car, for, in the very same year (1968), he won the Formula I title and dedicated it to the departed Clark.
However, life proving once again that it is crazier than fiction, Hill too perished in a crash — only that this accident involved a plane.
