Why Correa's return is the feelgood story racing needed

Motorsport has been long overdue a feelgood story amid a tough 2020, and junior series veteran team ART has duly delivered. The French squad has handed a return to racing for Juan Manuel Correa in FIA Formula 3, after a season and a half out of action - a legacy of the horrendous Spa-Francorchamps Formula 2 feature race accident in 2019 that took Anthoine Hubert's life.

The incident at Eau Rouge does not bear thinking about, even after time has created some semblance of distance to it, and Hubert's death and Correa's critical state rocked the motorsporting fraternity to the core. The American's subsequent recouperation to walk again, then, has been nothing short of miraculous.

But Correa's road to recovery has been long and arduous, thanks to the severity of the injuries he sustained. He suffered fractures in both legs, which he commented were "hanging by the skin" in multiple interviews following his accident. He also endured a spinal fracture, and was placed in an induced coma having contracted acute respiratory distress syndrome.

After doctors ensured that Correa's lungs were working, they could operate on his legs - his right the worst affected. Doctors provided him with the option of having part of his right leg amputated, but Correa instead decided on more lengthy surgery to it. The initial operation took 17 hours to complete.

That he not only stands, but does so on the precipice of an emotional racing return, is testament to his grit and determination.

Having spent a year in a leg brace, Correa had it removed in late October 2020 - having documented his recovery and rehabilitation on his Instagram page - and instead has a metal rod in his leg to assist with his leg bones' continued growth. Now, attention has firmly switched away from getting his strength and physical faculties back and instead honing his reflexes to those of the racing driver he was before his crash.

As a racing driver, Correa was beginning to hit his stride as he entered the competitive world of F2. His time in Formula 4 had been modest, although had been outscoring new Mercedes Formula 1 junior driver Frederik Vesti in the 2017 German F4 season before making a mid-season switch to GP3. There, he linked up with the Jenzer team to occupy the team's vacant third seat - having raced the first half of the year with just Arjun Maini and Alessio Lorandi. Making the jump from F4 to GP3 was no easy feat, and Correa spent that half-season among the backmarkers - but crucially, had been making progress.

Remaining with Jenzer for another year, Correa was outscoring the wonderfully eccentric David Beckmann before the German joined Trident for the second half of the year and inexplicably became an outside bet for the GP3 title. In a Jenzer team that could not capture the same form as it had in 2017, Correa was an industrious points scorer - in much the same way that Yuki Tsunoda was in the following season with the team.

"There is still some work to do physically, although I have kept up with that as much as I could do in the wheelchair. I was very dedicated and always thinking of this moment" Juan Manuel Correa

The Quito-born driver then earned a step up to the Sauber-affiliated Charouz team in F2, earning junior driver status with the Swiss F1 team behind the Alfa Romeo operation. Correa proved he could manage the step up and secured two podiums in the Baku and Paul Ricard sprint races - the former an impressive feat given it was his first visit to the notoriously capricious Azerbaijani streets.

Next to team-mate Callum Ilott, who fought for the title in his sophomore F2 campaign, Correa was beginning to close the gap to the combative Briton. Then, his F2 campaign was sadly stopped in its tracks.

Devoid of context, a return to the third tier on F1's ladder would otherwise be a step back for Correa - but in his case, it shows his immense power of will. Throughout his career, Correa has been a fighter on-track, and his no-quarter-given battle with Jack Aitken in the F2 Paul Ricard sprint is one such example of his determination in wheel-to-wheel combat. In that skirmish, in which he barged his way past at the Mistral chicane, he refused to acquiesce to the subsequent demands of the Campos driver into Le Beausset - and later claimed second as his reward.

Correa, undoubtedly, will draw on his gutsy nature when he climbs behind the wheel of ART's F3 car for the first time. He has been keeping his skills sharp with his appearances in various Esports events, most notably in the Virtual F1 series with the Alfa Romeo squad during 2020's lengthy off-season, but there's no substitute for the real thing.

When he returns to the track, his first battle will be one of race fitness. Driving the F3 car should be less of a physical drain than diving straight back into F2, but it will still require deftness on the accelerator pedal. Hopefully, his reconstructed right leg will retain the requisite mobility to provide the right throttle inputs, and it's also vital that he can exert the right amount of pressure on the brake pedal with his left.

F1 veteran Johnny Herbert suffered with the latter during his first top-tier races after graduating from F3000 on the back of a horror crash at Brands Hatch. With Benetton in 1989, Herbert was a right-foot braker in the latter days of manual gearboxes, and had to change the way he used his foot between the brake and the throttle following his accident. Still unable to push the brake pedal hard enough, Benetton dropped him after six races following his failure to qualify at Montreal.

The move from the paddle-operated semi-automatic gearboxes helped Herbert to reignite his career with Lotus, later becoming a three-time grand prix winner with Benetton and Stewart, but his injuries took their toll on a promising early career.

Correa will have to overcome similar issues, but he says that he is already able to put weight on his leg.

"I am pretty free to put weight on the leg and I can basically do whatever I want," he said in an interview with Formula 3, "as long as the pain allows it. Since then, it has just been a lot of hard rehab. I am walking a bit already without any help and I am walking quite big distances with the help of a crutch, so I am slowly regaining a sort of normal life."

His second challenge will be a psychological one. There will be remnants of discord lodged within his psyche following the traumatic events of 31 August 2019, and he will also have to put his mind to the whetstone to keep it sharp for the demands of racing. Drivers need to have cat-like reflexes and make decisions in fractions of a second - and although Correa has been training for this very moment, the true test of his mettle will come in testing.

"There is still some work to do physically, although I have kept up with that as much as I could do in the wheelchair," he told F3. "I was very dedicated and always thinking of this moment. I didn't allow myself to just sit on the couch all day or leave it all until the last minute.

"Then there is the mental aspect, which we are working on too. We are working on the things that we can work on, both physiological and cognitive, including my reactions and everything like that. There is a big unknown though because I do not know what it will feel like to drive again after what happened, and after such a long time."

Aligning himself with the ART squad is a very shrewd move - not just from Correa, but from the team's top brass. Alfa Romeo F1 boss Fred Vasseur (pictured with Correa at Spa last year) still keeps his hand in at the team he helped to found, and team principal Sebastien Philippe has worked with numerous champions in F2 and GP3 - including Hubert, George Russell and Nyck de Vries.

An amiable personality with a searing competitive spirit, Correa has the tools to make his recovery a success - and all will be hoping that he can

Having taken Theo Pourchaire to within a sniff of the F3 title last year, the team now has Prema refugee Vesti on its books - the perfect benchmark for Correa to measure his recovery against. In short, Correa, has the team around him to make his third-tier return comfortable.

But he must be afforded time to get back up to speed. There will be rustiness and any lingering effects of his crash to overcome, but he has every racing fan who has watched his progress over the past year in his corner rooting for him. An amiable personality with a searing competitive spirit, Correa has the tools to make his recovery a success - and all will be hoping that he can.

For us non-racers, Correa's return to racing is a victory in itself. For Correa, as a fierce combatant on a racing circuit, he will likely only count it as such if he takes the chequered flag and stands not only unaided, but upon the top step of a podium.

Juan Manuel Correa once stared death in the face, and death backed down. After time to heal, he has another opportunity to clamber back onto the ladder to F1, and all will be united in their admiration of him if he shrugs off the pain to climb it to the top.