Written by Archie O’Reilly
Sting Ray Robb is largely unscathed, in good spirits and cleared to race in Toronto after suffering a 109G impact after vaulting airborne over Alexander Rossi’s No.7 Arrow McLaren Chevy and flipping multiple times in the second race at Iowa Speedway on Sunday.
The AJ Foyt Racing driver admitted he did lose consciousness after emerging from the car, which had been upside down on the tarmac. But after being placed on a stretcher and into an ambulance, when he gave a thumbs up for the television cameras to catch, he quickly came around.
He was transported to a local hospital as a precaution but was released that evening.
For the first time since the accident on Sunday, Robb spoke to the media on Tuesday and reflected on the crash that wiped out both himself and Rossi, as well as Kyle Kirkwood and Ed Carpenter as they attempted to avoid the wreck…
The contact with out-of fuel Rossi
The initial contact came due to the sudden slowing of Rossi’s machine after a battle with low fuel in the closing laps. Robb had been having a similar problem during the middle stint after only getting “about a half a tank” of fuel in the car in the first pit stop.
Robb was still on track to finish respectably after holding the likes of Carpenter behind and running a better final stint. But in the closing laps, he started to notice Rossi slowing. And when Rossi did eventually run out of fuel on the final lap, it was too late for Robb to react.
“I could see that Rossi was slowing… I didn’t know to what extent,” Robb said. “I looked up going into Turn 1 just to see where he was located - I think it was about three-quarters of the way through the turn. I could see the closing rate… it was very, very big. It was so massive.
“It’s kind of like the worst-case scenario when you’re exiting a turn at that speed with that closing rate, not knowing what other drivers are thinking or experiencing. I wish I could have hit a reset button like on a simulator, start over again. I’m sure he would be thinking the same thing. There were four cars that were pretty much totaled in that accident.
“The fact that we’re all safe and sound and ready to go for Toronto is pretty impressive.”
The airborne stage of the crash
One can only imagine the terror of being almost catapulted airborne while in an enclosed cockpit, awaiting and bracing the impact that will inevitably come. But racing drivers have to be wired to embrace the fear and Robb admitted he “was actually not that afraid” in the period he was airborne and even perpendicular to the track.
“As I was up in the air, I could see the top of the catch fence almost at my level,” he recalled. “At that moment I realised I was in some trouble there. I still had my hands on the steering wheel at that point, bracing myself. I had enough time in the air where it kind of went slow motion. I let go, grabbed under my harnesses to hold on.
“On the way down I had time to think about accidents that I’ve seen in recent history where guys, they’ve gone flying through the air like that. Think about [James] Hinchcliffe, [Scott] Dixon at the Speedway. Even Simon Pagenaud last year [at Mid-Ohio] - 112Gs, I was at 109Gs.
“The fact of the matter is I should be more hurt than I am. I don’t know why I’m okay as I am. I’m giving the glory to God for that. Thanking the crew picking me up out of the car. Everybody did their job as they were supposed to.
“When I came down, felt the impact, it did knock the wind out of me. I didn’t feel any of that piercing through my legs or any sort of damage there. A couple light bruises of the bulkhead hit my knees. I was very, very surprised that I was okay as I was.”
The scariest part for Robb was the uncertainty of the impact.
“It is a scary incident,” he said. “You don’t know what is going to happen. While you’re in that moment, it’s terrifying, you don’t know what your future holds. When I turn my future over to someone, which is where my faith comes in, it allows me to move on much quicker than I think I would otherwise.”
The 109G impact and multiple flips
Being sent as high in the air as Robb was, the impact - first coming on the rear left corner of his No.41 Chevy - was always going to be big. The sight of the car lifting as it did was concerning. But that sort of accident is almost unpreventable at those speeds on a bullring like Iowa Speedway.
“We’re doing 170, 180 miles an hour on that track,” Robb said. “You do anything at that speed, it’s going to get lift-off in some way, shape or form in my mind. The car came down very well. I didn’t take off left, right or anything into the catch fence, which I’m very, very grateful for. I wouldn’t change a thing about this car. I think it’s as safe as it’s ever been.
“I think that IndyCar has done a great job of looking at and analysing past crashes and adapting to make cars even stronger or better for the future. I’m sure they’ll do the same here. I’m sure there will be little things here and there that they could find. From my perspective, everything worked as it should have and I’m safe because of that.”
The safety of the Dallara DW12 certainly helped to prevent Robb from taking the brunt of the impact.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that the aeroscreen saved a lot of damage to my head and to who knows what else that would have happened to me in that incident,” Robb said. “The halo was ground down quite a bit. The titanium that I burnt my finger on got pretty hot from grinding on the surface.
“I haven’t seen my helmet yet, but from the people that have inspected it, there’s no visible issues with the helmet. It’s pretty impressive because that means that the cockpit did its job, everything in there took the impact rather than me taking the impact. The aeroscreen was severely damaged but that’s because it worked as it was supposed to.”
The ‘Am I okay?’ process
Adrenaline is pumping at any time racing at those speeds, let alone when flying airborne as Robb was. It is hard for drivers to distinguish whether they are actually feeling any pain after an impact. But Robb quickly suspected he had got away lightly given the scale of the crash - one of the biggest in recent memory.
“When I immediately slowed down and stopped, I did a quick self-check,” Robb said. “I had the wind knocked out of me. The belts did their job. Everything worked as it was supposed to. I didn’t have any cuts or anything abnormal. I had some bruises on my hips from the lap belts working, as they should have.”
Robb was upside down for a period of time before the swift work of the AMR Safety Crew enabled him to be flipped back over. And once Robb eventually was extracted from the car, he did then pass out for a brief period.
“When they brought me out of the car and pulled me out, I got light-headed,” he said. “Kind of [like when you] sit out the bed too quickly in the morning sometimes, you get light-headed, see stars a little bit. It was like that but just super severe. I passed out for… I don’t know how long it was, it was pretty quick. When I came to, I was like: ‘I’m not doing too well.’
“‘Yeah, we know.’ They immediately laid me down on the stretcher. It was a precautionary that we want to make sure it’s not just dehydration, turning 248 laps left, getting dizzy from that. Once I was down on the stretcher, I felt great. I was seeing clearly. They hooked me up to an IV - immediately I could feel the energy come back and I was ready to go.
“The Life Flight [helicopter] out [to hospital] was to get a CT scan and make sure everything was good and it wasn’t just the adrenaline of the moment. Honestly the worst injury I got was on my finger. I touched the halo getting out of the car. It turns out when you take titanium and scrape it across the ground for a few hundred feet, it gets hot.
“Don’t recommend. Lesson learned. You’ll get a blister from touching hot titanium.”
The aid of the AMR Safety Crew
The instant that Robb slid past the nearest location of an AMR Safety Crew team after sliding upside down across most of the backstretch, you saw a vehicle moving out onto the track to come to Robb’s aid.
It was another case of the AMR Safety Crew being the very best in the business.
“They did everything and beyond what they could have done,” Robb said. “When I was getting to a stop, my spotter was on the radio: ‘You’re almost stopped, you’re almost stopped… they’re there.’ Literally as I came to a rest, there was someone ducking under the halo to see: ‘Dude, are you all right? What’s hurting? Can you breathe?’”
Robb, about as genuine a character as you can meet, even holds regret at how he acted in the moment of delirium that the AMR Safety Crew reached him in.
“I’ll be honest, at that point adrenaline was going so I didn’t handle that as good as I’d like to,” he said. “I was a little upset. I was like: ‘Of course I’m hurt. Did you just see what happened to me?’ ‘Can you breathe?’ ‘Yes, I can breathe but it’s not very good. I’m hanging upside down in an Indy car.’
“When they flipped me over, I don’t know how many guys were there, 10-plus members of the crew supporting me. When I passed out, I could feel two guys holding onto my arms, two guys behind me. They were fully in support of me and I was fully reliant on them in that moment. They did everything to make me safe and it shows.”
The aftermath (with a flying stingray)
When Robb reached the infield care centre, teammate Santino Ferrucci had immediately made a beeline to visit his friend. Robb also received many well-wishes, some memorably uplifting.
“I got a pretty good teammate in Santino,” Robb said. “He immediately came over to the care centre after the crash, checked on me. The texts I got that afternoon… it was a gift of a flying stingray jumping out of the water with a few comments below. That was entertaining - typical teammate fashion. I was happy he put a smile on my face at that moment.”
Resetting and recovering for Toronto
Getting back in the saddle and geared up for a fourth race in three weekends - the next on-track session only five days on from the accident - would appear a challenge. But Robb believes there is nothing better than to get back in the car.
“When you get kicked off the saddle that hard, you want to get back on as quick as you can to keep the momentum going,” he said. “I’m very excited I get to do that this weekend. As a matter of fact, the team has done a good job to get the car back together and get it in the truck and headed back to Toronto this [Tuesday] afternoon.”
Robb has reflected on events and now feels as though he is able to move on.
“It’s as simple as a short memory,” he said. “Also I think gratitude is something that is overlooked a lot of times in these instances of looking at things that went right leading up into that event and during that event… Also just being thankful. I feel like God protected me in that instance.
“Having the ability to get back in the car this next weekend, I’m not doing it from a place of fear, I’m doing it from a place of gratitude and thankfulness and joy that I get to go driving a car again.”
All considered, he feels in a good place mentally.
“We underestimate the mental side of racing a lot of times because, as athletes, we want to just turn into robots and switch on to the next game, just forget what we went through,” he said. “It’s not that easy sometimes. Honestly, I’m doing very well.
“I had a conversation right before the race weekend talking about how my faith takes away the fear of dying in an accident or something like that. You don’t think about getting hurt that bad. I think the fear that I didn’t feel, that I should have felt, was very surprising. I think that just comes from having that foundation of faith that I stand on.
“That’s what I’ve been leaning on as I recover from this. I find gratitude in the fact that I am as good as I am as far as health goes and that mentally I have a chance to recover very quickly heading to Toronto. I have a great group around me that support me well. Having them in my life after an accident like that has been very important.”
Robb spent Monday following the concussion protocols but was cleared to “push the limits a little bit” after passing the tests of the IndyCar medical team and is already working out again.
“I didn’t pass out [working out] today, which is great,” he joked. “My head stayed on straight. I will admit my cardio has gone down during the season more than I would like to admit. Other than that, felt great.”
Reflecting on things more positive
Robb may be marginally last in points of the 21 drivers to have competed in every race but he is making progress in his sophomore season. He finished 16th at Mid-Ohio before a season-best 15th, which could have been event better, in the first Iowa race.
“Mid-Ohio was a decent race for us,” he said. “We didn’t qualify as well as we’d like, had an issue there. Going into the race, we finished 16th. That was because of the team strategy. We just had really good in and out laps, decent race pace. That was really good to see moving forward in the field that way.
“First race at Iowa, could have finished higher had I done my job better on restarts. The nature of the track made it really difficult. The fact of the matter is we’re building momentum, building a programme a lot from a new team with a lot of new engineers, new mechanics. It’s taken time to get to this point but that momentum is being felt.
“We’re getting better every weekend. Race Two [at Iowa], running P19 with only a half a tank of fuel in the car in the middle of the stint was pretty impressive. The fact we were able to get those laps back when we did and move forward was really good. I think going into Toronto, we’re heads up, really excited about it because I want to get in the car as soon as possible.
“But it’s also a track that some of our team members have done well at in the past. The knowledge they’re bringing is going to help us a lot. I’m excited, as well as my teammate - he’s 10th in the championship right now. I’ll be cheering for him to keep moving forward and hopefully drag me along with him for some success too.”
Robb feels “very optimistic” and feels a maiden IndyCar top 10 could be on the cards “very soon” courtesy of the team’s steps forward amid their alliance with Team Penske.
Valuable Indianapolis 500 lead experience
Robb crashed out of his debut Indy 500 in 2023 after only narrowly making the field. While a little off-strategy, he led the third-most laps of anyone in 2024, which offered him a big confidence boost.
“Third most laps led was better than only 92 laps completed” he said. “That was the highlight of my career, leading laps in the 500. I remember that first pit cycle, the only car left on track in front of me was the pace car. I was a little worried because I realised what that was going to do to us. The strategies merged as the race went on.
“We were actually in the fight, except for that lap 148 yellow, we were going to be there in the mix. That was the game. The race chooses the winners. That weekend it chose Josef [Newgarden] as the winner. We were that close to having a shot at it. That was cool to see, a lot of fun and definitely one of the things I’ll hold onto forever.”
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