Motorsport is dangerous. It's an exploit to be taken seriously, and nothing less than peak physical fitness is expected of drivers to reach peak performance.
But motorsport is also a highly competitive business, and the stakes are high. When money has been invested, taking the decision to prioritise health over competition isn't easily made and history is littered with cases of drivers throwing themselves into battle while a long way from being fully fit.
As the world watches Lance Stroll's efforts this weekend to see if the Canadian can exploit the potential of his Aston Martin package while recovering from his wrist injury, Autosport looks back at some noteworthy instances of racers pushing through the pain barrier - sometimes to their own detriment.
Jackie Stewart, Nurburgring 1968 - Kevin Turner
“If it had been a dry race, I wouldn’t have won. It might have been too much for me, but in the wet it didn’t really worry me at all.” Jackie Stewart’s modest account of the 1968 German Grand Prix underplays one of the great Formula 1 performances.
Three months before round eight of the championship, Stewart had broken the scaphoid on his right wrist in an F2 practice crash at Jarama. He missed the Spanish and Monaco GPs before finishing fourth on his return in Belgium.
Stewart then managed a victory in a wet Dutch GP and a third in France, so this entry could be about multiple races with injury, but it’s his win at the fearsome Nurburgring that stands out.
Having been treated by Muhammad Ali’s doctor and still wearing his plastic support, Stewart stormed from sixth into an 8.3-second lead on the first 14.2-mile lap. The Scot set a best time of 9m36s on a day no one else bettered 9m51s and his Tyrrell-run Matra took the flag more than four minutes clear of second-placed Graham Hill’s Lotus.
PLUS: Stewart’s 10 greatest F1 drives
Had it not been for the F2 crash and those missed rounds, Stewart would probably have been 1968 world champion but he’d once again shown all the naysayers to his safety campaign that he truly had inner steel.
Niki Lauda, Monza 1976 - Kevin Turner
Both of Niki Lauda’s F1 comebacks must be regarded as among the finest in motorsport history, but his first must surely be among the greatest in sport.
Lauda’s fiery crash at the Nurburgring on 1 August 1976 almost killed him and left him with serious head and lung injuries. He was famously given the last rites. And yet on 12 September – just six weeks later – he finished fourth in the Italian GP, ahead of the driver (Carlos Reutemann) hired to replace him by Ferrari.
Lauda later admitted to having been scared when he went out for practice at Monza. “Rigid with fear” was how he described it in his autobiography To Hell and Back, so this was a mental challenge as well as a physical one.
Typically, having made a return sooner than anyone thought possible, Lauda dug deep once again and got quicker and quicker on Saturday. He qualified fifth, ahead of both team-mates Reutemann and Clay Regazzoni, and then recovered from a slow start to take his remarkable result. His balaclava was covered in blood where his burns had opened up…
Top 10: Ranking Lauda’s greatest F1 drives
Lauda later demonstrated another kind of bravery by withdrawing from the wet Japanese GP title decider due to the conditions, losing the crown to James Hunt by a single point.
Ricky Rudd, Daytona 500 1984 - Charles Bradley
When it comes to racing with an injury, taping your eyelids open so you can see in the corners as hardcore as it gets.
Ricky Rudd had just got a big break with Bud Moore’s NASCAR Cup Series Ford team in 1984 – swapping rides with Dale Earnhardt – but suffered a huge crash in the season-opening Bud Clash at Daytona. Amazingly, all he hit was the ground in the 200mph-plus shunt, as his Thunderbird somersaulted nine times.
Rudd didn’t break any bones but suffered facial injuries and torn cartilage in his ribcage as the bottom of his seat had snapped, and he was rag-dolled around inside the car, with effectively only the lapbelt restraining him.
Rudd returned to the track in the backup car for Daytona 500 practice just two days later, but recalls “when I got into a corner, I couldn’t see, it was like lights-out”.
Moore suggested it was his swollen eye sockets that were causing the problem, and Rudd says: “We couldn’t get the swelling down with ice, I was like a fighter who’d had the crap beaten out of him.
“I don’t recall whether it was my idea or his, but it didn’t require a lot of thinking! Somebody got some scissors and cut up some duct tape and taped the swollen eyes up – not so much the eyelids, more the excess skin above [and below] it.
“We got it stuck, put the helmet on and it worked. It didn’t hurt and it fixed it. We got some fancier tape, medical tape, for the 500.”
With his taped-up face, Rudd finished a lapped seventh in Daytona and won next time out at Richmond. When asked if he’d considered sitting out those races to recover, Rudd replied: “I wasn’t going to do that because we still had to eat.”
During the next race weekend, at Rockingham, the problem returned despite his facial swelling having subsided, and Rudd was diagnosed with concussion at the School of Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University. It directly led to NASCAR installing medical clearance protocols for its drivers.
Vincenzo Sospiri - James Newbold
Vincenzo Sospiri had plenty of form for driving around injuries. Twice, the Italian finished on the International Formula 3000 podium with broken bones, and in 1999 he raced a full season in the SportsRacing World Cup taking pain-killing injections after a shoulder injury sustained at the end of the previous year - before taking an operation that limited his movement and prompted his retirement from racing.
"I drove with one hand basically for all of 1999," he admits.
It began in 1988 in Formula Ford, when Sospiri hurt his neck at Donington Park.
"They checked it in, it was fine," he recalls. "I said it was hardly fine because it was so painful, so I went back to Italy, X-rayed it properly and they found the fourth vertebrae was broken. They said, ‘You need a neck collar, to not move for one month’."
But Sospiri was out racing the very next weekend at Thruxton. After using a neck brace for practice and qualifying, he removed it for the race "because it was so uncomfortable, it was impossible to move". Remarkably, he capped the year with victory in the Formula Ford Festival.
Fast forward to 1993 and Sospiri qualified eighth for the Hockenheim F3000 round with a broken hand after a kerb strike. David Coulthard's broken gearbox and a late engine failure for Gil de Ferran helped his Mythos Reynard climb through to third. But his performance at Estoril in 1994 for Super Nova was even better.
Nursing another broken hand after getting caught up in a first corner crash at Spa - "I hit the car in front of me with my front-right and then basically the shock of the tyres came into my hand and broke my hand in three places" - it wasn't certain that Sospiri would be able to race, and Allan McNish tested in his place. But, from eighth on the grid, admitting he'd been trying to save himself for the race in qualifying, Sospiri put in crucial passes on Guillaume Gomez and title contender Franck Lagorce as he moved through the pack to finish second only to eventual champion Jean-Christophe Boullion.
"Even if it was very painful, I used to cope with it," reflects Sospiri, who went on to claim the F3000 title in 1995. "I feel it, I’m not stupid. It’s hard, but I could cope with it.
"I think it’s more to do with your head, how strong mentally you are. When the race comes and the visor goes down, the pain is not there anymore."
Colin McRae, Rally Catalunya 2002 - Tom Howard
Despite facing the prospect that further damage to a badly broken little finger would result in amputation, Colin McRae defied doctors' orders in the search of World Rally Championship points in 2002.
The 1995 world champion found himself in a race to be fit for Rally Catalunya following a crash on the penultimate stage at the previous round in Corsica, which his Ford boss Malcolm Wilson described as “genuinely scary”.
McRae and co-driver Nicky Grist slammed sideways into a tree at more than 50mph, the impact fierce enough to snap a solid pipe in the Ford Focus’ roll cage. While Grist escaped with a sore head, McRae suffered a slight concussion, bruised ribs and leg, and a severely broken little finger, which had become trapped between the steering wheel and dashboard. He was airlifted to hospital in Ajaccio, where surgeons sewed tendons back Source: Autosport