Crash, p.14
CRASH, page 14
Matt Straker turned to face the race engineer. ‘What you have found, Andy, seems to have narrowed down the apparent cause of the crash. It gives us something to focus our research on.’
Backhouse nodded. ‘As well as gathering the telemetry, I’ve now got the guys going through all the records of the steering mechanism, the brakes and the hydraulics – the history of each component involved, when it was made, when any of the elements were replaced, who did the work and when they were last tested. That way, we can hopefully demonstrate our system was young enough and proven enough to have been trustworthy. I’m hoping that we can show – if it was a component failure – that we were not wrong to have had faith in it for the race.’
‘Would the issues you’ve spotted have any consequences for the crash itself? How the car went on to behave? How it might have affected the spectators as it broke up?’
Backhouse shrugged. ‘I doubt it, but now that we suspect what might have gone wrong, we could take a look.’
They all turned back to face the screen.
Backhouse pressed Play. The video clip ran on.
Straker re-watched Sabatino's reaction to the steering failure. The car was shown reaching the outside of the bend, where it bounced violently over the red-and-white kerbstones around the outside edge of the corner and headed off across the gravel trap.
‘Steering and brakes are completely ineffectual across this sort of loose surface,’ Backhouse explained, ‘although Remy does do something unusual.’
Straker said: ‘Oh, yes?’
‘She reapplies the lock from the steering wheel.’
‘While she's on the gravel? Knowing it wouldn’t have any grip?’
Backhouse nodded.
‘Why would she do that?’
‘Because it's doing something.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked McMahon.
‘Remy was hurtling forwards, effectively out of control. Instinctively, she should be braking right here – except that, on this loose gravel, any brake pressure would surely result in locked-up wheels. But, look, she's not even doing that – all four wheels are still rolling.’
‘So it did look like the brakes failed?’
Backhouse shrugged. ‘We’ll have to wait to read the tea leaves. But if she's not getting any deceleration from the brakes, and you’ve nothing left, you might try anything to slow down; hence it looks like she's turned the steering wheel to try and use the angle of the front wheels as a some sort of retardant.’
‘So the steering is working here?’ McMahon offered. ‘No longer heavy?’
‘On loose gravel, Sandy, the steering probably would turn.’
‘And how much effect did doing this have?’ Straker asked.
‘Nothing significant.’
Straker examined the screen closely. ‘But by turning the wheels she meant to create something of a plough effect?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘At that speed, Andy, wouldn’t the gravel, stones, dust – whatever – ruck up in front of the wheels? Spray outwards?’
Backhouse nodded.
‘Why isn’t it, then?’
Backhouse's face showed genuine surprise.
He peered in closer to study Straker's observation.
He ran the footage back and forward several times, to make sure.
‘Well, I’ll be…’
As the footage of the crash was run on, the next occurrence was the car striking the tyre wall.
Backhouse stopped the footage again. ‘This is how the crash became so catastrophic,’ he said, ‘how the subsequent damage was done.’
The frozen frame showed the Ptarmigan at the moment it made contact with the tyres. ‘We can see here, very clearly, the speed of her impact,’ said Backhouse. To make the point, he ran his finger across the screen from where Sabatino had left the track to her point of collision. ‘Modern circuits have sizeable run-off areas, across which cars are given a chance of slowing down, long before they come into contact with anything solid. Formula One has instituted massive improvements to this idea over the years. Early on, it was simply straw bales lining the track. Then we saw speed traps made from wire netting held up by fence posts, which had to be abandoned because some wretched drivers were nearly decapitated. One of the crucial breakthroughs in safety, where space is tight, was the development of the Armco barrier. In more spacious circuits, there was a move to wide, loose-lying gravel traps – designed to slow cars down with minimal forces of deceleration. The most modern circuits nowadays have large expanses of asphalt, where the cars can slow down over much longer distances.’
‘But?’
‘The Zhar-ptitsa appears to comply with all those modern safety standards, but it doesn’t quite, somehow.’
‘That's a little cryptic,’ said McMahon. ‘In what way?’
Backhouse responded: ‘They’ve used tryes, rather than the more modern interlocking Tecpro barriers and, most significantly, they’ve used a gravel trap here, rather than the more recent preference of an asphalt run-off.’
‘So?’
‘Remy went across that gravel trap extraordinarily quickly.’
‘Why wouldn’t she?’ asked the lawyer. ‘How fast was she going when she left the track?’
‘Probably a hundred and eighty-plus miles an hour.’
‘So she was going to be going fast,’ added McMahon.
‘No question,’ countered Backhouse. ‘But my point is that a gravel run-off should still offer some deceleration. It should do something to slow a car down, even one going this fast. I’m saying it didn’t seem to offer her any. The gravel did almost nothing to slow the speed of the car.’
Straker latched onto this observation. ‘Could that be connected in some way to the lack of gravel spray we saw as Remy turned the wheel?’
Backhouse pulled a face. ‘Possibly. It might have something to do with the way the trap was made? The type of gravel they used? The depth of it, perhaps?’
Straker was silent.
‘Then,’ said Backhouse, ‘there's the angle of impact. Current design, where possible, constructs barriers, walls and perimeters at a very shallow angle to the track. A car is meant to glance off on its initial contact with something solid, or at least merge with it slowly, so as to slow the car down without a sudden impact.’
‘And here?’
‘The outer concrete wall, and the tyre buffer in front of it, are at a pretty steep angle to the direction of travel.’
‘So the impact was going to be more severe?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Is that a design flaw, or just an unlucky fluke?’
Backhouse shrugged his lack of strong opinion. ‘Turn Eleven is far more of a curve than a corner. There's more than enough room to brake beforehand if the drivers wished, allowing them to decelerate without destabilising their cars. This is not a corner that most in Formula One would expect drivers to come off at.’
‘Doesn’t that rather back up Yegor Baryshnikov's comment, then, that her attempt to go around the outside was not expected: that she was taking a huge risk – doing something beyond the expected safety of the circuit?’
‘Maybe. All I’m saying at this point is that Sabatino's impact was faster and more severe than I would have expected it to be. Before she got there, hardly any of the energy of the car had been dissipated, which meant that this crash was going to be more violent – go on for longer – and go further – than it ought to have done.
‘And then we come on to the other “break” with modern circuits. Tyres instead of Tecpro barriers.’
‘What difference would that make?’
‘Tecpro dissipates more of the energy away laterally, and doesn’t reassert itself after impact anything like as much.’ At this, he nudged the video on, one frame at a time, until it showed Sabatino's rear wheels lifting off the ground. ‘There,’ he said, ‘do you see the tyres? Having been compressed by the impact, they are now bouncing back – reasserting themselves. I think that force, pushing back and down on the nose cone, was why the back wheels were lifted off the ground, and why the car started to rotate.’
Straker scrutinized the picture. ‘We’ll definitely need to check this further. We could challenge the circuit's design during the trial. At this stage, though, what effect could a steering failure have had on the dynamics of the car?’ he asked.
Backhouse looked at each wheel and the nose cone assembly. ‘By eye, I couldn’t say there was anything different at this point; we can try and confirm some of this when more of the detailed data comes in. At the point of impact, the front wheels are centred, back in the middle of their lock.’
Backhouse cued the video again.
Sabatino's car was now rotating through the vertical and starting to somersault. Once again the film was stopped and studied, but without significance.
It was restarted – again in slow motion. A few moments later it was Straker who leant forwards and froze the frame. He’d done so after the inverted car had slammed into the “I”-sectioned upright and had begun to swing round horizontally. ‘What about here? Does anything untoward happen to the front wheels, now, because of a steering failure?’
After Backhouse had peered at the image for a few seconds he said: ‘Not that I can see.’
On it went again, right through to the point when the car was spinning on up the grassy bank, scything through the people on it.
‘Does it look like a potential steering failure made it any more likely that Sabatino's car would hit or kill any more spectators during the actual crash?’ Straker asked.
Backhouse said: ‘Not that I can tell from this. My key observations, from what we have seen, remain the speed of the car across the gravel – and the angle of impact with the tyre and concrete walls.’
They let the video footage run on. It then became an aerial shot, taken from the helicopter circling directly overhead.
Suddenly Straker's attention was held.
‘Andy, Andy,’ he said quickly, ‘back up – back it up.’
Backhouse touched the slider on the screen.
The clip was replayed. The camera was focusing on a broken part of the wall. Straker tapped a key and froze the frame.
‘What?’ asked Backhouse.
Straker, using a two-finger spread, enlarged his selected area of the image to fill the screen. ‘Take a look at that…’ he said.
Backhouse peered in.
‘Does that look normal to you?’
Backhouse's eyes narrowed, moments before he shook his head. ‘Good God, no. No, it does not.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
Sandy McMahon was distracted from their video analysis. Her mobile had just gone off. Answering it, she was told that the Yeltsin Meditsinskiy Tsentr had just rung her office in Brandeis Gertner. Apparently, Remy Sabatino's condition was improving – and Mr Uglov, the consultant in charge, had declared the injured Formula One driver fit enough to be interviewed by the police.
When McMahon passed this on to Straker, he became agitated. ‘We’ve no idea how ready for this she is – no indication of her condition. We have got to speak to her before any interview is held.’
MacMahon agreed.
‘Given the legal stakes and sensitivities, it's imperative she has legal representation there – particularly if the police are as brutal with her as they have been with Tahm. Is Remy really going to be robust enough for all this so soon after such trauma? Sandy, these people aren’t going to interview her – they are going to interrogate her. She’d be hugely vulnerable to intimidation, to being tripped up – to being prompted into saying something incriminating.’
McMahon launched into a rapid round of phone calls and email correspondence with the Ministry of Justice, the British Consulate and the hospital – urgently trying to secure Remy Sabatino's right to legal representation.
After an hour of protracted negotiation, McMahon managed to achieve a result. Once again it needed an intervention by the British consul, personally, directly with the prosecutor general. Talking over the loudspeaker on the phone in the private cabin of the motor home, the consul said: ‘I’m afraid I had to go quite far. I hadn’t meant to, but the intransigence of these institutions on all this is staggering. I made the point emphatically to Gazdanov himself, that the eyes of the world were on this case. I said that any hint of legal nihilism – anything less than a full, clear, equitable process – would have serious international consequences. But that didn’t seem to bother him.’
‘How did you swing it, then?’ asked Straker.
The consul said: ‘In desperation, I’m ashamed to say, I brought up the Magnitsky scandal. That did work, though; it was the only thing to knock him back. That and the likelihood of more UN sanctions.’
‘Magnitsky did it?’ Straker said.
‘It seemed to. Their attitude in this Grand Prix case, though, is unprecedented,’ said the consul. ‘There is a zealotry involved; I’ve never known anything like it. Anyway, you now have permission to go and see Ms Sabatino before the police do. I can only advise you make the most of your time with her, as I wouldn’t want to say how many more chances you’ll get.’
Straker thanked the consul for his efforts.
They disconnected the call. Straker said: ‘Let's go to Remy straight away. We don’t want to miss the chance to debrief her – and to warn her of what's about to happen.’
They headed into central Moscow. The day's overcast light was still unbroken by the blanket of low cloud. It rendered every view sullen and drab. Straker looked out of the window as they made their way west through southern Moscow along the Third Ring Road.
‘It was extraordinary to hear the prosecutor general's reaction to the consul bringing up your example of the Magnitsky case.’
‘I’m not surprised it had an effect on him,’ McMahon replied. ‘It would have been a provocative point. That case was a huge issue here.’
‘And the consul mentioned sanctions: I hadn’t realized the UN went that far.’
McMahon nodded: ‘Oh, yes – it all went a very long way. December 2012. The US Congress even passed the Magnitsky Act, imposing significant restrictions on US citizens and companies interacting with key Russian officials. The biggest impact was that it prevented named Russians – senior people – from using the American banking system.’
‘Did that work?’
‘Disproportionately well, actually, and not to the detriment of the Russian economy, that time. Most of the senior government figures had sizeable wealth abroad. That Act of Congress froze those assets, targeting pretty effectively the political class that was probably responsible for the Magnitsky death in the first place. Hence, I imagine, the sensitivity when the consul raised it in his conversation with the prosecutor general. Diplomatically, though, the Magnitsky Act served to recalibrate the world's view on the integrity and reliability of Russia's institutions. And to those of a certain age, it was an uneasy flashback to the Soviet Russia of the Cold War.’
Their car pulled up outside the hospital. In reception, the permission they believed they had been granted to see Sabatino was flatly refused. Once again, numerous calls had to be made – back through the British Consulate, and from there to the prosecutor general's office – before their request was finally granted. It took thirty minutes for this tortuous communication trail to bear fruit.
Eventually, it was Mr Uglov who appeared in reception to authorize their visit. But his approval was heavily qualified. They had to fill out detailed forms before they were allowed any further into the hospital; even when those had been completed, several of their entries were challenged or elaborations were demanded. Only after that did the consultant let the visitors up to Sabatino's room.
Straker's concern was compounded when their way was barred by the two armed policemen standing guard directly outside her door. Further records were taken of his and McMahon's ID before they were allowed through.
At last Sabatino's door was opened to them.
Straker led the way in.
He wasn’t sure what to expect. The reality of her state struck him hard. In a closed room, the curtains still drawn under orders from the police, Sabatino was lying on the bed, lit by a harsh overhead fluorescent light. Monitors, drips and tubes attached to needles in her right arm were arranged haphazardly around her bed.
It was Remy Sabatino's encasement in the halo brace that hit Straker hardest: its ring bolted to her skull, and the four spars anchoring it rigidly to the body-armour-like vest, created a harrowing image.
Lying under a single sheet, folded back to her waist because of the body armour, Sabatino wore a hospital gown to cover the rest of her torso. Straker saw the plaster casts on her left leg and arm. He saw the tracheotomy tube protruding from her throat – and the small patch of diffuse blood that was showing through the cloth-like straps around her neck. His expression fully reflected his shock.
Straker wasn’t sure that Sabatino was yet aware of his presence. He studied her eyes and realized she was in a semi-stupor. Gently, he said: ‘Remy?’
Her eyes swivelled towards the voice. Sabatino breathed: ‘Matt!’
She moved her right hand across her body – the tubes from the drip flapping – to touch his arm.
The warmth she derived from seeing someone familiar showed immediately in her eyes; tears started welling. ‘What are you doing here? I’ve not seen anybody – no one's come to see me – not Tahm, Andy, Yegor. I’ve been completely isolated.’
All Straker could do, thinking of the legal situation they faced, was to squeeze her hand and offer some comfort.
‘I have no idea which hospital I’m in, or where I am. I’m just relieved to be in one piece … well … sort off.’
Straker continued to hold her hand, longing to provide support for as long as possible. It was clear that Sabatino was completely oblivious to what had been going on.
