How Indy 'pulverised' an F1 champion

Even today, 25 years on, Nelson Piquet walks with a pronounced and pained shuffle, the legacy of the enormous crash that brought his top-level racing career to a definitive halt.

He'd been persuaded to enter the 1992 Indianapolis 500 for a substantial fee; the tragic irony is that he fell in love with the challenge of the Brickyard, felt denied by wrecking his Lola-Buick (and his feet) during practice, and longed to have another crack at winning the race. But there would be no fairytale return for the three-time Formula 1 world champion.

Piquet came to Indy at a different point in his career trajectory than Fernando Alonso has. Over the course of four largely underwhelming seasons with Lotus and then Benetton, Piquet's F1 stock had dropped and the arrival of Michael Schumacher as his team-mate late in 1991 hastened his departure from the scene.

He concedes now that he'd spent those years racing largely for the generous pay packets on offer, and hiding the true extent of a head injury he'd suffered in an F1 shunt at Imola's Tamburello corner in 1987.

"I lost three dimensions," he says. "Not double vision - it was flat, like a TV. I only realised when I got in my helicopter and went to fly.

"It was so strange. But I kept quiet in case they didn't let me race. In the car, I was so slow. I had to have somebody in front of me [to follow] during qualifying.

"I was getting better, but never the same as before, and that's why in the middle of that year I signed the big contract with Lotus. I thought I would never be as quick as I had been before the [Tamburello] accident."

Come 1992, with his F1 career over, Piquet was lured back into action by the prospect of another big pay day.

"I'd stopped racing and gone back to work in Brazil, to look after my business," he says.

"But I'd always wanted to do the Indy 500 and Le Mans. When I was back in Brazil I was offered a chance to run in the Indy 500. I thought, 'Hmmmm - do I really want to do this?' I was busy working. But it was a lot of money [he rubs his thumb and forefingers together to add visual emphasis], and they paid me, and I went - and I had an accident before the race!"

If Piquet arrived at Indianapolis in cruise-and-collect mode, something changed during the first few days of rookie orientation and practice. The high-revving stock-block Buick V6 engine, built by the well-regarded Menard team which was running Piquet, had grunt aplenty (if not always the stamina for a full race distance) and the Lola chassis was easy to drive.

Piquet sailed through the rookie tests and was straight into the pace ballpark, lapping consistently at 225mph and beyond.

He had always been a technical driver, known for his dedication to testing, to fine-tuning a set-up rather than wrestling a sub-optimal car. Learning the unique tricks of Indianapolis, where speed is highly sensitive to changes in ambient temperature and track conditions, appealed to him.

"I loved the circuit," he says. "Loved the challenge, the pure aerodynamics, the stagger of the tyres. In the morning I had minimal downforce, was flat everywhere.

"It started sliding at midday as it got hot - I put more wing on and was flat everywhere again. Then in the afternoon, down on the wing again, still quick.

"For three or four days I was quickest in the morning, the middle of the day and the afternoon. I realised people were doing six, seven, eight laps quick - I was doing every fucking lap quick!"

The passage of time is lending some economy to the actualite here, since Jim Crawford topped 230mph several times in his King Racing Lola-Buick over the first six days of testing. But Piquet was impressive enough for observers to consider him in with a shot at qualifying in the top 10.

On May 7, though, he hit the wall.

Piquet explains today that he had been concerned about wasted time spent in the pits during refuelling stops and caution periods, that because of changing track conditions "if you lose 20 minutes you have to start over [on set-up]".

That's why, when the yellow lights were illuminated that Thursday, he stayed committed to the throttle and then dived into the pits at the last minute. He thought that if he made a very short stop, he would have time to do another run after the errant piece of metal on the back straight - the cause of the yellow - had been retrieved.

Footage later emerged of him running over that debris shortly before the accident, but it's most likely that it was the sharp lift of the throttle at Turn 4 as he turned in to the pits that prompted the Lola to gyrate. It hit the wall head-on a barely diminished speed, and the impact left Piquet's feet "pulverised", to quote Terry Trammell, IndyCar's resident surgeon, who presided over the six-and-a-half-hour operation that followed at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis.

"There was so much of the foot missing that there was a significant question of whether we could put together what was damaged," said Trammell.

On May 15 another Indy rookie, Jovy Marcelo, who was yet to qualify for the event, spun at Turn 1 and suffered a basal skull fracture. Piquet was still occupying a bed at Methodist Hospital when Marcelo was admitted and pronounced dead.

At the Speedway, the show went on: Al Unser Sr took over Piquet's entry, qualified 22nd and finished a tantalisingly close third. Over the coming months, as Piquet recuperated, he determined that he would have another go, regardless of the pain in his reconstructed feet.

When John Menard offered him a car for the 1993 Indy 500, Piquet accepted. Pre-event testing went well, and the Buick engine - now rebadged as a Menard after the manufacturer withdrew financial backing - seemed to have shaken its habit of grenading unexpectedly.

Initially, the month of May went more smoothly for Piquet, and he qualified 13th - five places behind his old F1 nemesis Nigel Mansell, now an Indy rookie himself. But on race day, after 38 laps, his engine reverted to type and expired messily.

Emerson Fittipaldi, in whose career slipstream Piquet had followed during the late 1970s, won the race and then set a minor storm in motion by declining to drink the traditional glass of buttermilk as he accepted the trophy. Amid the brouhaha, Piquet slipped away quietly, never to return except as a spectator.

Asked if he made the decision to go back in '93 because of the money on offer, Piquet gives an emphatic answer: "No, it was for pride.

"But the accident, for me, was also the best thing that happened in my life, because... it made a wall between racer and businessman. When I started in business it was so difficult to join the real world, to be 100% sure I wanted to do it.

"If I hadn't had the accident, I might have carried on racing for, what, five years? 10 years? But the accident told me I needed to do something else with my life, something different."

Bar a couple of sportscar outings, he has been absent from the racing scene ever since, except in support of his sons' racing careers. But he remains in touch with events, and admits to being very interested in Alonso's unexpected 2017 Indy 500 campaign.

"It's a completely different way of racing," he says. "He'll like it. My advice? Keep off the wall..."