Professor Sid Watkins - a remarkable man

Folk drifted in and out, offering congratulations to Andretti, who accepted them with a half-hearted smile, a shrug. There was a sense of suffocating poignancy about that evening, as a few of us sat around, making desultory conversation. Mario didn't say much, just lay back in his chair, lips pursed. On the shelf at his side were bottles of champagne, unopened.

The phone rang. It was the hospital in Milan, for Andretti, and he went off to take the call, returning a few minutes later, relieved beyond measure. "Ronnie's going to be okay! They say his leg injuries are bad, and maybe he'll miss the start of next season, but all his vital signs are good, Thank God..."

Now it seemed right to open the fizz, and Mario toasted the recovery of his wounded buddy. But overnight, during a long operation to reset Peterson's broken legs, complications developed, and he died in circumstances which were, to say the least, unexpected.

Occurrences of that kind were hardly unknown way back when. A Formula 3 star of the '60s once told me of an acci-dent in an Italian street race, after which a driver was taken to hospital with a broken leg. "They screwed up with the anaesthetic," he said. "Gave him too much - literally put him to sleep. In some places, quite seriously, we regarded the hospital as more dangerous than the bloody race track..."

If safety in motor racing has been transformed in the last 20 years, so also has the quality of medical care available to an injured driver, as we saw, most notably, following Mika Hakkinen's accident in Adelaide last autumn. Without any doubt, the moving spirit behind the advances in rescue and treat-ment has been Professor Sidney Watkins, whose book Life At The Limit was recently published.

It was Bernie Ecclestone's idea, 18 years ago, to invite Watkins to become medical consultant to the Formula 1 Constructors' Association, and he has never had a better one. Since 1982, 'The Prof' has been president of the FIA Medical Commission, chairing the governing body's Expert Advisory Group, and attending every Grand Prix, as well as continuing with his 'day job' at the London Independent Hospital. Quite how he contrives to do all this remains a mystery to everyone in the paddock.

Although my father was a doctor, and I thus grew up in a medical household, my subcon-scious expectation was always that eminent physicians should have names like 'Sir Lancelot Spratt' (as immortalised by James Robertson Justice in Doctor In The House), and at first 'Sid' seemed to me a somehow inappropriate handle for a professor of neurosurgery. In fact, it suits him to a tee, for I know of no one more unpretentious.

Nor more healthily irreverent. As I read his new book, many an off-record chat came back to me, and I couldn't help thinking that the publisher's libel lawyer must have been busy with his pen. The Prof has an exceedingly fine sense of humour, sharpened by a loathing of pomposity. At Aida last year, lacking the necessary pass, he dared to venture into the Paddock Club for a pee, and - being merely important, rather than self-important - was asked to remove himself. "Did you say anything to them?" I asked. "Yes," he replied, deadpan. "Don't get ill..."

Never less than good company, The Prof sparkles especially when armed with a glass of red wine and a Romeo Y Julieta. His fireproof overalls must be unique in having one pocket marked 'Cigars' and another 'Emergency Cigars.'

If he has the capacity to reduce an audience to helpless laughter, so of course there are times when it is necessary to speak to him about more serious matters. At the Nurburgring last year I well remember his impatience with one or two tabloid journalists, who were seeking to make a shock-horror drugs story out of the fact that Rubens Barrichello and Max Papis had taken pre-scribed medicines, containing 'controlled substances', to cope with their heavy colds.

That motor racing is immeasurably safer than it was owes much to Watkins's work over time, but still it can never be other than fundamental-ly perilous. In 1982 he was greatly saddened by the death of Gilles Villeneuve, a driver of whom he was very fond, but undoubtedly it was the loss of Ayrton Senna, a dozen years later, which had the profoundest effect, for the two men were extremely close friends.

On the Monday morning, following that catastrophic Imola weekend, I saw The Prof at the airport in Bologna, and spoke with him at length of the loss of Senna, of Roland Ratzenberger, of the repercussions for this sport we both loved, yet surely hated just then. It is a conversation I have never forgotten, and came back to me when I read the opening chapter of the book. Entitled 'Sunday, 1st May 1994 - Imola', it tells calmly, movingly, of the day Ayrton died, and includes many anecdotes from their friendship.

It came as no surprise to learn that The Prof had written this book himself, for no profes-sional 'ghost' could have done justice to it. He does not usually suffer from premonitions, he writes, but had one immediately before the accident, and knew, even as the medical car approached Tamburello, that it was Senna.

There is a clarity, a simple beauty, in his description of Ayrton's last moments. "He looked serene. By raising his eyelids it was clear from his pupils that he had a massive brain injury. We lifted him from the cockpit and laid him on the ground. As we did he sighed and, though I am totally agnostic, I felt he departed at that moment."

Remembering that fearful weekend, through the eyes of Professor Watkins, brought tears to my eyes. That morning in Bologna, The Prof told me of his suggestion to Ayrton, on seeing his extreme distress at the death of Ratzenberger, that maybe he should give the race a miss, indeed perhaps consider retir-ing forthwith. This he relates in the book, together with Senna's considered reply: 'Sid, there are certain things over which we have no control. I cannot quit, I have to go on.'

You may have gathered by now that I hold The Prof in great regard, that I consider Grand Prix racing inestimably fortunate to have benefited from his skills and his counsel over the last 20 years or so. If I have made him out to be a saint, I have done him an injustice, for he is far more interesting a character than that. Gerhard Berger - as usual - put it best: "You only have to chat to Sid, and you feel better for it."