Sid Watkins

Sid Watkins: The Man in the Second Car

At Imola on 1 May 1994 a neurosurgeon knelt on the tarmac and raised the eyelids of the driver who was his closest friend in the sport. "He looked serene," Sid Watkins wrote of Ayrton Senna. "It was clear from his pupils that he had a massive brain injury… he sighed and, although I am not religious, I felt his spirit depart at that moment." Nine years earlier the Formula One drivers had presented Watkins with a silver trophy. The inscription read: "Nice to know you're there."

A Garage in Liverpool

Eric Sidney Watkins was born on 6 September 1928 in Liverpool to Wallace and Jessica Watkins. His father, a Gloucestershire coal miner turned bicycle and motor-vehicle repairer, ran a garage and disapproved of his son's medical ambitions; Watkins worked in the shop until he was twenty-five. He won a scholarship to Prescot Grammar School and qualified in medicine at the University of Liverpool in 1956, researching the effect of heat stress on intellectual performance — an unlikely thesis that turned out to be directly applicable to men sealed inside hot cars making decisions at 180 mph. Four years in the Royal Army Medical Corps in West Africa followed, then neurosurgery at Oxford's Radcliffe Infirmary from 1958.

Watkins Glen on Weekends

In 1962 he took the chair of neurosurgery at the State University of New York's Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, and found that a racing circuit called Watkins Glen was down the road. He spent his weekends running its medical operation — the accident of name is a coincidence, the vocation was not. He returned to England in 1970 as head of neurosurgery at the London Hospital, joined the RAC Medical Committee and worked the British Grand Prix. The apprenticeship was complete before Formula One knew it needed him.

$35,000 and a Tent

In 1978 Bernie Ecclestone, running the Formula One Constructors Association, offered Watkins the job of official race doctor at $35,000 a year, out of which he was to pay his own flights and hotels. He took it, kept his London consultancy, and arrived at the Swedish Grand Prix to discover what passed for Formula One medicine: a caravan with a tent attached, and no helicopter during practice.

Monza, 1978

The education came fast and it was brutal. At Monza that September, Ronnie Peterson crashed on the opening lap and Italian police formed a human wall that Watkins could not get through. Eighteen minutes were lost. Peterson died in hospital. Watkins went to Ecclestone and demanded proper equipment, an anaesthetist, a dedicated medical car and a helicopter, and got all of it by the next race in America. From then on the medical car followed the field on the first lap — the single most important structural change in the sport's safety history, and one that exists because a man was kept from a patient by a police cordon.

The Second Car

What followed was twenty-six seasons in which Watkins did not miss a race. He was first responder at the worst moments the sport produced. At Zolder in 1982 he intubated Gilles Villeneuve at the trackside and flew with him to Leuven. At Montreal weeks later he reached Riccardo Paletti sixteen seconds after impact, worked the airway as the car burned, and came away with his boots melted and his hands badly burned. At Adelaide in 1995 he restarted Mika Häkkinen's heart twice after volunteer doctors performed a tracheotomy within fifteen seconds. Gerhard Berger, Martin Donnelly, Érik Comas, Rubens Barrichello and Karl Wendlinger are all credited to him.

He was equally willing to stop a race weekend. When Nelson Piquet crashed in practice at Imola in 1987 and Ecclestone suggested a few exploratory laps, Watkins replied: "Bernie, if Nelson gets into a car, I'm leaving the circuit — and I won't be back." Piquet did not drive, and later said the Prof had been right. Asked once who should pay for the expensive apparatus he kept demanding, he said: "Well, knock it off your driver's salary — it's for him, not me."

Imola

The weekend of 30 April–1 May 1994 broke the sport. Barrichello was badly hurt on Friday, Roland Ratzenberger killed on Saturday, and Watkins — who had urged Senna to stop, to go fishing with him instead — was at Tamburello on Sunday. He was clear afterwards that the head injury made survival impossible. He was equally clear about what had to happen next.

The Committee

Out of Imola came the FIA Expert Advisory Safety Committee, with Watkins as chairman: a standing body that treated driver survival as an engineering problem to be solved rather than a risk to be accepted. Watkins had already founded and presided over the FISA Medical Commission in 1981. Now he pushed the harder changes through — revised driver seating position for leg protection, mandatory crash testing of carbon-fibre chassis, the high cockpit sides introduced in 1996, better belts, trained extrication teams drilled on current cars, intensive-care-grade circuit medical centres, standardised helicopter protocols and his own Thursday inspection of every facility. In 2003 he set up rally and karting research groups; these became the FIA Institute for Motor Sport Safety in 2004, with Watkins as president. That October he became the first president of the FIA Foundation for the Automobile and Society.

Why Sid Is Called a Genius

Watkins is usually called the Prof rather than a genius, and the distinction is worth keeping. He made no landmark discovery in neurosurgery; the papers that carry his name did not change the discipline. His talent lay in two things that rarely coexist.

The first is craft under maximum time pressure — airway management on hot tarmac, with a burning car and one chance to get a tube into a windpipe before hypoxia does permanent damage. He did it on Villeneuve, on Paletti with his own hands on fire, on Häkkinen twice. That is physical skill and drilled judgment rather than intellect, and it should be named as such: the ability to act correctly in the first sixty seconds, repeatedly, for twenty-six years.

The second is genuinely cognitive, and is the better claim. Watkins reframed motorsport death from misfortune into a systems failure with identifiable causes, and built the institutions to attack them: the medical car on lap one, the extrication team, the crash test, the standing safety committee. Almost nobody in medicine was thinking that way about sport in 1978.

The counter-case is that most of this was administrative persistence rather than insight — he won arguments because he was trusted, funny and willing to walk out, not because he saw something nobody else could. And the reforms were largely reactive: Monza produced the medical car, Imola produced the safety committee, and the pattern is that men died first. Watkins would have accepted the charge. He simply refused to let any death go unused.

Legacy

He founded the Brain and Spine Foundation in 1992 and remained its patron, wrote *Life at the Limit* (1996), *The Science of Safety* (2000) and *Beyond the Limit* (2002) with Jackie Stewart, and gave the first Watkins Lecture in 1998. He took the Mario Andretti Award for Medical Excellence in 1996, an OBE in 2002 for improving the safety of Grand Prix racing, an honorary doctorate from Liverpool in 2004 and the FIA Academy Gold Medal in 2011. He retired as FIA medical delegate on 20 January 2005; Max Mosley called his contribution unique. He died on 12 September 2012, aged 84, at King Edward VII's Hospital in London, and the Singapore Grand Prix stood in silence for him. Stirling Moss and Jackie Stewart were among two hundred at the memorial at St Marylebone in January 2013. The Walton Centre in Liverpool opened a building in his name in 2015. He liked cigars, whisky and fishing, and prescribed the second of these for insomnia.

Achievements

• Officer of the Order of the British Empire
• honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons — 2008
• Held posts at State University of New York Upstate Medical University