How Robert Wickens returned to Victory Lane
Last month Robert Wickens became a race winner again, defying his paralysis by using hand controls to score victory at Watkins Glen’s IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge event with Hyundai. On the same day at Goodwood’s Festival of Speed, disabled motorbike world champion Wayne Rainey rode his Yamaha YZR500 again and quadriplegic Sam Schmidt – Wickens’s IndyCar team boss at the time of his horrific Pocono crash – drove a McLaren 720S using head movements to guide the car.
“I guess it was a great weekend for disability awareness, right?” smiles Wickens. “It’s all pretty cool stuff.”
There hasn’t been a whole lot for him to smile about since 19 August 2018 at Pocono. The hardest consequence of his devastating shunt was the lack of prognosis; nobody knew what recovery he might achieve given the spinal cord contusion he’d sustained. The only thing that did appear agonisingly certain was a halt to his top-flight motorsport career. Turns out he was thinking of it as merely a pause…
Less than four years on, 33-year-old Wickens was back in Victory Lane – albeit at a lower level than the rarified atmosphere of IndyCar, Formula Renault 3.5 or the DTM where he shone so brightly before. Sharing his adapted Hyundai Elantra
