The death of Gonzalo Rodriguez

Laguna Seca, California, 1999. The narrator is Dr Steve Olvey, Indycar Medical Director between 1979 and 2003:

Twenty three year-old Rodriguez was from Uruguay. It has his first day to drive what we now had to call a Champ Car...I was stuck in the med center as usual but didn't really mind. The day was damp and cold. I would just as soon be inside.

"Yellow! Yellow! Yellow!" soon came over the safety channel.

I quickly glanced at the TV monitor. All I saw was a view of the retaining wall just beyond the top of the Corkscrew. A severely torn advertising banner was flapping in the breeze. There was nothing else on the screen. Soon, a Safety Truck arrived at the scene and the guys jumped out and headed for the wall. Terry [Trammell] was in that truck. I watched as he slipped then fell while running frantically to the scene. I couldn't understand why they were all in such a hurry. Then they showed it. From a different camera angle, a racecar was seen on the other side of the wall, upside down, flat as a pancake against the earth. It was several feet down the steep embankment. A photographer standing nearby rushed over to the car, looked down, then abruptly turned and ran away.

Terry stumbled again as he cleared the wall. He raced down the hill towards the car. Some of the other safety guys had already reached the crash site. It did not look good.

"Steve, it's a Code 10!"



I couldn't believe it. The car looked as if it had sustained only some minor damage. Looking closely at a view of the impact point, now being shown on the TV, I was able to make out a large splash of red, exactly where the car had gone over. It was blood, not paint. I learned later from Terry that Rodriguez had bled out completely before the car ever hit the ground. His entire blood volume was on the wall, the banner, and the ground leading up to the car.

Accident reconstruction would show that Rodriguez had hit the wall in a slightly nose-down attitude after becoming airborne when he left the pavement. This caused his torso to be ejected upward and forward out of the seat. This motion was stopped by the shoulder belts as his head continued to accelerate unhindered from his body. His skull separated from his vertebral column, severing the large blood vessels that supply the brain. The hemorrhage from his nose and mouth was massive. Death was instantaneous. (Rapid Response, p201-203).