Sonoma Raceway's medical team ready for IndyCar
SONOMA — The final and clinching race of the IndyCar season should be a cause for celebration. Instead, the flags are at half-staff at Sonoma Raceway for the GoPro Grand Prix of Sonoma Sunday, and a palpable gloom hangs over the garages. The racing circuit is mourning the death of Justin Wilson, a talented and popular Brit who was killed by a flying piece of debris last weekend at Pocono Raceway in Pennsylvania.
Wilson's death was the occurrence every raceway dreads. Considering the power — Indy cars go well over 200 miles per hour on oval tracks — and fragility of the machines, it's a wonder there aren't more fatalities. For that you can thank the skill of the drivers, the safety features introduced and enforced by IndyCar, and the expertise of people like Dr. Brian Schmidt and Todd Axberg.
Schmidt and Axberg, both affiliated with Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, have overseen the medical center at Sonoma Raceway since it was created in 2005. They have a small but veteran staff, and they are responsible not just for professional drivers who skid into walls, but every man, woman and child who passes through the gates off of Highway 121 on a race weekend.
Their duties are as varied as the IndyCar paint schemes.
'Their primary responsibility and their training is to respond to an accident on the track, but that's a very small percentage of what they actually end up dealing with,' Sonoma Raceway president Steve Page said. 'Cuts, bruises, bee stings, allergies. The ability we have to deal with even minor medical or health issues, from all the guests — fans, sponsors, officials, crew members — just really sort of radiates throughout our whole facility.'
The litany of maladies includes concussions and spinal injuries, fractures and dislocations, chest pain and 'foreign bodies' in the eyes, and the dehydration that easily sets in at a track where temperatures can reach 122 degrees on the asphalt on summer race days.
The raceway, known as Sears Point and Infineon in earlier incarnations, has always had medical attendants. It used to be staffed by doctors from Sonoma Valley Hospital. They were perfectly competent, but the on-site facility was basically a small room with a couple of gurneys. The doctors were severely limited in their ability to diagnose and treat.
In 2003, with NASCAR providing some pressure, Sonoma Raceway owner Bruton Smith approved a more sophisticated medical center at the track. Schmidt and Axberg were obvious resources. As Schmidt notes, Santa Rosa Memorial is the second largest non-university trauma center in California, and has the highest injury severity scoring in the country.
Schmidt, the trauma director, has worked at the hospital since 1988. He's a Santa Rosa native whose father, Leon Schmidt, worked in the area for decades as an anesthesiologist. Brian's sister and brother are doctors, too. Axberg, the chief lead nurse in the emergency room at Memorial, is a 25-year veteran. Two years ago, NASCAR recognized him with its national Nursing Director Award.
'Brian's terrific. The whole group of docs is amazing,' Page said. 'And Todd really is the glue that ties the whole thing together and keeps it organized and staffed.
The duo quickly learned that trauma care is a different job at the raceway. On the positive side: A hospital emergency room doctor might see a critical patient 30 minutes after he or she is injured; during a race, a doctor in a fire suit might get to an at-risk driver in 30 seconds. On the negative side: This is not the controlled environment of a hospital.
'You're on the track, and all of a sudden you realize you can get hurt,' Schmidt said. 'You can touch the wrong thing, get burned. Every year someone gets hit, (for example) in the pits. So you've gotta have situational awareness.'
There's another big difference. The crashes at Sonoma Raceway are violent, even terrifying. But the drivers are so talented, and the vehicles engineered so thoroughly for safety, that the injuries are frequently less severe than at a downtown intersection.
'If Brian and I are working in Memorial in the trauma suite, and we get a ring-down with a motorcyclist that goes off at 100 miles an hour, we are obviously expecting the very worst of the worst,' Axberg said. 'It is not unknown for a motorcyclist to go down here at 100 miles an hour and get up and walk away.'
Depending on the event, Santa Rosa Memorial will provide eight to 10 nurses and three or four doctors for a race. The team has remained largely the same for the past seven years.
The medical suite at the track is an easy-to-miss office right next to the drivers' lounge. It comprises one large room and several side rooms with a total of nine beds (they try to reserve the ones closest to the door for drivers), including four resuscitation beds. Schmidt and his team have a digital X-ray machine, a defibrillator and an eye kit — bits of flying debris are always a hazard here. They are able to run EKGs on a laptop, and they have a hand-held lab device that can analyze things like cardiac enzymes and electrolytes in as little as six minutes.
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