Sunday Motorsport And A Death: RIP Henry Surtees

This is not the article I started to write.

Sunday came rolling around again, and there was much for me to do. The lawns need cutting, the trees are crying out to be trimmed, and I haven't finished the guttering refurbishment I started weeks ago.

Sunday is also a great day for motorsport, so I gave that priority. On TV there was F2, 125cc bikes, WTCC cars, and the MotoGP I was really looking forward to.

This evening I settled down to write an account of a couch-potato's motorsport Sunday, and my impressions of the various racing formats I had seen, especially the superb MotoGP.

Remembering that earlier on I had seen a young F2 racer named Henry Surtees, I idly wondered if he might be a relative of John Surtees the great motorcycle champion and 1964 F1 champion, maybe a grandson.

The Internet knows everything, and reading Henry Surtees' entry in Wikipedia I was amazed to discover that he was in fact John's son. Yup, John born in 1934 had a son born in 1991.

I found a photo of John and Henry Surtees, and you see it above.

Minutes later, when I went back to Henry's page on Wikipedia it had been amended to show him as having died on July 19th, 2009.

I was dumbstruck and horrified, and immediately checked some news sites to ensure a cruel hoax had not been played.

It was all too true. Henry was struck by a wheel that had become detached from the car of Jack Clarke, and he died later from his injuries. How often have we seen rogue wheels in F1?

Always when there is a fatality in motor racing I briefly feel guilty that someone has died to entertain me. Really I know that they died because they loved racing, and they needed to win.

Still this has stabbed me, and I will see Henry Surtees' smiling young face for a long time.

My very sincere condolences to the Surtees family, I just don't know what else to say when someone has lost a son at 19-years-old.