One of world motorsport's most respected medical advisers has admitted that, while recent safety improvements in
Formula One undoubtedly saved the life of
Heikki Kovalainen on Sunday, he remained concerned about the length of time that it took to attend to the Finn.
Kovalainen speared off the road and into the barriers at the Circuit de Catalunya during the weekend's Spanish Grand Prix, with his
McLaren becoming wedged under the tyre wall. Despite track workers being on the scene almost immediately, the medical car had to be despatched from pit-lane, almost half the length of the circuit away, and work to remove the Finn from the cockpit went on for some time.
While onlookers feared the worst, Kovalainen was eventually freed with little more than concussion and bruising, giving a thumbs up signal from the stretcher as he was carried to a waiting ambulance. However, Dr Steve Olvey, director of the neuroscience intensive care unit at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami and a founding member of
FIA's safety division, maintains that the Finn should have been attended to, and extricated, far sooner than he was.
"Ten or twelve years ago, that could have been a fatal crash, [but] track safety is now such that there is a lot of science in the tyre barriers," he told
Associated Press, "Even though the car got buried into the tyres, it was still a relatively minor injury considering the velocity and angle of the crash.
"However, you don't have a lot of time and I think this accident will be investigated thoroughly to see if there's any way to gain access to the driver faster. That is a problem because, if you are unconscious and perhaps not breathing, you don't have more than two or three minutes before you get some kind of significant damage. That's going to have to be looked into."
