Speed Reader

There is a precariously-balanced stack of pristine new books sitting here waiting to make their way into this column, but I've decided to ignore them for this week.

They'll get their turn (well, most off them will), but this time around I decided to take a look at a book that was released a couple of years ago, partly because it's related to American open-wheel racing and can therefore be tenuously tied in with this weekend's Indy 500, but mostly because I came across a copy last week and checked it out on a whim. In book reviewing terms, that counts as living on the edge.

For those who don't know, Dr Stephen Olvey is essentially North America's answer to Prof Sid Watkins. Olvey was Medical Director for CART between 1979 and 2003, after which he moved across to the ill-fated Grand Prix Masters series. He is also founding member of the FIA's institute for motor sport safety.

Olvey played a central role in revolutionising both the science and the attitudes towards safety in American open-wheeler racing, and his account of almost 40 years in motorsport (he started on the medical team at Indianapolis in the mid-1960s) makes pretty compelling reading.

Later in his career he became a fairly prominent spokesperson on the American racing scene, and as recently as last month was in the news when he expressed concern at the response time following Heikki Kovalainen's accident in Spain.

But he is probably best known for his involvement saving the life of Alex Zanardi after the Italian's dreadful crash in Germany in 2001; an account of which both opens and closes these memoirs, assisted by a Foreword from Zanardi himself.

It's a hugely enjoyable book. As well as being fairly handy with a medical kit, Olvey has a good instinct for storytelling, and a generous dose of anecdotal material helps his tale move at a good pace. He is also very good at putting developments into a historical perspective, and using examples to make a point. Take his account of failures to diagnose concussion in the early years:

"Duane Carter Sr, father of Indy 500 veteran Pancho Carter, told me about a weekend of sprint and midget car racing that was probably not unique in those days. He crashed heavily one Friday night in a sprint car race. He knew this because of the newspaper clippings his wife showed him the following week.

"As the story goes, he groggily refused to go to hospital after the crash and had his wife drive him to another track for a midget race the following night. He competing in a third race on Sunday afternoon. On Monday he discovered three trophies sitting on the breakfast room table but had no recollection of having received any of them."

There are many other such examples. Some, like his tale of 1973 Indy 500 winner Gordon Johncock being loaded into an ambulance after being hurt in a shunt only to fly out of the rear door "as if being buried at sea" when the vehicle took off because neither the bed nor the doors had been secured properly is both amusing and horrifying in equal parts (Johncock was OK, but not surprisingly refused to get back into the ambulance).

Other stories are simply funny - I particularly liked the one about AJ Foyt getting tired of being blown off at the lights on his daily trip to work by a kid in a heavily-modified coupe, and dealing with the problem by putting a stock car engine into his pick-up. There's also a couple of amusing pages about Olvey's cameo in the film 'Driven', which he was quite excited about until he actually saw it.

But the story that ties the whole thing together is fundamentally a serious one, and Olvey addresses it with admirable candour. He is not shy about mistakes that have been made - and Champ Cars, sadly, did go through some painful patches.

But as he points out, some shortcomings don't reveal themselves until too late, such as the change in surface from asphalt to grass that sealed Greg Moore's fate when he spun into the infield at California Speedway.

What is most amazing though is how little information transfer there was between different racing series, both domestically within the US and overseas. Olvey and Watkins did start working together eventually, but despite the fact that each championship has its unique safety needs, you'd have thought there was enough common ground for earlier co-operation.

Even more remarkable is the reluctance of certain championships to become involved at all. Olvey frequently points to NASCAR as having left the question of safety to individual teams and promoters rather than taking a broader approach to the issue, although I don't know whether this situation persists today.

Olvey's affection for CART is obvious and understandable, given his long tenure with what was, in its heyday, a world-class series. But he never lets himself become blinded by romance or sentiment, and consequently his observations and honestly also give the book added value as a series history.

Rapid Response covers a lot of ground in its 288 pages, and on the whole Olvey rarely puts a foot wrong. Irrespective of your level of interest in motorsport safety, it's worth checking out.