The images from the first minute of the Indianapolis 500 still horrify: Stan Fox's race car, hurtling head-on into the wall, airborne after a broadside collision with Eddie Cheever.
The front end of Fox's car is ripped away, exposing his feet and legs, as thousands of bits of debris shower the track. After landing, Fox is slumped over in his seat, already unconscious, legs dangling onto the pavement.A month later, Fox is awake and able to smile and acknowledge people as they walk into his room at Methodist Hospital. Because of a tube in his throat, he cannot talk but has mouthed some words.
He has improved to good condition and recently was moved from the critical care unit to a private room.
Dr. Kenneth Renkens said Fox is likely to leave the hospital for a rehabilitation facility in about two weeks, although it will be months before he goes home. His recovery from his serious head injury will take one to two years, Renkens said.
Fox is lucky to be alive.
Renkens, a neurosurgeon, removed a blood clot from Fox's brain shortly after the first-lap crash, then watched and waited for five days to see if the potentially fatal swelling in his brain would go down. Fox, a midget car veteran who drove Indy cars only once a year, finally came out of a coma June 2.
His condition changed little until the past few days.
"He's quite alert and beginning to respond more. I'm sure he knows where he is, but we still don't know what level of recognition he has," said Charlotte Hatfield, a spokeswoman at Methodist Hospital.
Fox is awake most of the day, she said, completely off a respirator that had been used to help him breathe and has smiled and begun mouthing words.
He has begun physical therapy and is making spontaneous movements without prompting, Hatfield said. The brain swelling no longer is a problem.
At times, Fox is placed in an upright position in a chair to help keep his lungs clear. A few friends and family visit him regularly, and his wife, Jean, is with him every day. Sometimes, she turns on the television for him.
"He watches what's going on in the room, but whether he pays attention to the TV, we don't really know," Hatfield said. "There's no way to know how much he's aware of because he hasn't spoken at all. It's a very slow improvement, which is what was predicted with an injury like this."
Fox, who will be 43 Friday, probably owes his life to his race car, which did just what it was designed to do when it exploded on impact with the Speedway's concrete wall.
"There are features that are built into the cars to try and have the driver protected," Renkens said. "A helmet alone can't protect you from a brain injury, but the idea is you let some other mechanical device suffer the impact. In the case of cars, the cars disintegrate, or come apart, so they are the vehicle that absorbs the shock to protect the individual.
"In the case of helmets, the way that helmets are designed, you let the helmet suffer the impact, and it takes the pressure off the brain and the skull itself.
"In general, with high acceleration impacts, the fibers that are running between the brain cells themselves and the rest of the body can be injured. They can either be damaged beyond repair; they can be mildly damaged where they are just not functioning; and the mildest form of it is a concussion, where it's a transient event and people regain consciousness very early.
"If it's an injury where the cells are partially damaged but not completely damaged and they will recover function, then improvements will be made."
Fox, who has won more than 60 midget car feature races and 19 U.S. Auto Club national midget events over a 24-year career, was in his eighth start at Indianapolis, where his best finish was seventh as a rookie in 1987. He has competed in only five other Indy-car races at other tracks, none since 1984.
The Janesville, Wis., driver started racing midgets in Corona, Calif., in 1971. He was the Wisconsin state midget champion in 1979 and 1980 and was chosen the U.S. Auto Club's most improved driver in 1979. He raced Super Vees from 1981-83 and first passed his driver's test at Indianapolis in 1984, when he was unsuccessful in one qualifying attempt.
He was 15th in the American Racing Series in 1986 and made his Indy 500 debut in 1987, driving a backup car for A.J. Foyt. He also drove for Foyt in 1988 but lasted only two laps before a broken half-shaft gave him a 30th-place finish.
In between his yearly starts at Indy, Fox also was 12th in the USAC midget standings in 1989, fourth in 1990 and 1991, 12th in 1992 and ninth in 1993. He was second in the RCA Dome midget invitational in Indianapolis last year.
For this year's Indy 500, Fox qualified in the middle of the fourth row, his best start at the Brickyard. But for the third time in the past four years, his race ended with a crash in turn one. This time, Fox apparently ran over the rumble strip along the inside of the track. His car, a new Reynard, crossed to the outside, taking Cheever with him into the wall. The accident also knocked out four other cars.
"I'm not sure how I ended up 31st," Cheever said. "I must have bounced a little farther than the others. But if my job was to make Stan's impact a little softer, I'm glad I was there."
Winner Jacques Villeneuve noted the risks all drivers take.
"You never expect something's going to happen to you. . . . " Villeneuve said. "When something happens, like what happened to Stan Fox, it's really hard. So all my heart goes to Stan Fox and his family, and it doesn't matter if he comes back to racing as long as he has a full recovery."
Fox knew the risks, too, especially at the start of the race.
"The track is so tight that if something should happen in the first couple laps, the farther back you are the more chance you have to get involved," he said before the 1994 race, in which he finished 13th. "That's basically the main concern starting farther back, being involved in an accident or in somebody else's miscue.
"Usually it isn't a rookie; usually it's a veteran that goes soft. You just hope everybody in the race just comes in ready to race and nothing stupid happens. Or if it does, particularly that it doesn't happen to you."
But too frequently it did happen to Fox, who also crashed after 63 laps in 1992 and after 193 laps in 1994 when he was running 10th. He also struck the fourth-turn wall just before the start of a qualification attempt for the inaugural Brickyard 400 NASCAR Winston Cup race here last August.