Four-and-a-half hours into the 2014 Spa 24 hours, an uncomfortable silence descended on the Ardennes track as the red flags flew and the race was suspended. The cause was an alarming-looking accident between Stavelot and Blanchimont involving the Kessel Racing Ferrari 458 of Marcus Mahy and the similar, GT Corse-entered car of Vadim Kogay. With a helicopter intervention required to transport the seriously-injured driver to hospital, fears for Mahy were very real indeed.
Twelve months on from that accident, it is an opportune moment to find out how the likeable Guernseyman is doing, and thankfully, the news is pretty good. “It’s been nothing short of miraculous, really,” said Marcus when I spoke to him last week. “The doctors have given me a full set of examinations and have told me that everything is OK – I don’t have to go back for any more scans for a full 12 months.”
Having spent fully three months in various hospitals, firstly in Liège, then in Salisbury, Wiltshire, Marcus has good recall of the lead-up to the accident. “The car had come in out of schedule because Steven Earle had had a shunt at La Source. After we’d repaired that I got in, and that was my first stint in the car,” he explains.
“Now there had been a couple of shunts at Raidillon, quite bad ones and I suspect I picked up some carbon fibre because my front left [tyre] started going soft. I was watching the pressure monitor, heading down the hill at the back of the circuit. I started to work the car quite hard on the right-handers to bring the pressure up just to see if it would hold and it seemed to work. Then I got through Stavelot on the run towards Blanchimont and I saw the pressure going down so I knew I had a problem. I moved the car over to the right hand side to let the faster traffic through, because I knew I would be seriously compromised going through Blanchimont [with the soft tyre].
“Well, I don’t really know what happened next. The next thing I knew I had been clipped, hit in the rear, the car went sideways and I stamped on the brakes. But I went head first into the barrier. That’s all I can remember for about a month.”
No wonder. Marcus had sustained severe bruising to his brain, a broken neck, two broken vertebrae, punctured lungs and right ear hearing loss. He also damaged his left shoulder, ribs and chest and stomach muscles.
The road to recovery was long, but the competitive instincts of the racing driver often aid their recoveries from such injuries, and soon doctors were speaking with more confidence about his rehabilitation.
“I had incredible support from everybody, the medical staff in Liège and of course back in the hospital here in Salisbury,” he says. “Especially the emergency rescue workers at Spa, they were really great: they came to visit me in the hospital in Liège and have stayed in touch,” Mahy is clearly touched. “I still hear from them and get messages now.”
Having spent the whole of August in hospital in Liège , he was transported to Salisbury District Hospital Spinal Unit on 4th September, and then, on 24th September last year, finally made the emotional trip back home to Guernsey.
It didn’t take him long to decide that there would be no return to racing though, and he decided that retirement from driving beckoned. That’s not to say that Marcus will now be spending his time sitting around in his garden.
“I’ve always been very driven and there is always so much to be done!” he laughs. “I’ve been working very closely with Liam Talbot, [one of Mahy’s co-drivers at Spa last year and who is racing not only for Kessel again this year, but raced in the Nürburgring 24 hours for the first time this year]. Liam’s knowledge of the European circuits is not as good as it could be,” Mahy continues. “He’s a lovely chap, and he’s an intelligent driver – he listens: you know, he will sit down and you can talk to him about turn-in points, braking points and so on.”
In many ways, although Mahy may be associated with Kessel Racing, he has stronger bonds with Aston Martin Racing, having raced the Aston Martin Test Centre Vantage V12 in the 24 hours of the Nürburgring in 2014.
“Oh yes,” he smiles, “David King and I are in regular contact. Once you are part of the Aston Martin team, you become part of their family for life: and they invited me back to the Nürburgring 24 hours this year, to work on the strategy for the two GT12 cars. That was a great motivation for me to get well; to make sure I was strong enough to take on the challenge of the twenty-four hours. I didn’t just want to turn up and swan around!”
Marcus was as good as his word, staying for around twenty out of the twenty-four hours. “I did get incredibly worn out, because I was determined to do a proper job. It took me a week to recover properly. I did enjoy it though – I found that I was getting the same buzz before the race as I did when I was driving. I was involved with the driver changes and with the de-briefs. Unfortunately we lost both the GT12’s during the race: one due to a crash and the other because the gearbox broke. I felt as bad when those cars were out as I would have as a driver. It was really hard to lift my spirits for the rest of the team at the end of the race.”
Marcus Mahy won’t be back at Spa for the twenty-four hour race this year. “In some ways I would have liked to have gone, and Kessel did suggest that I could go and be part of the team,” he says. “As it is I am working on their stint strategy for them, so there’s no rest!”
For the remainder of the year, his plans are not fixed. “We’ve just bought a house on the beach in Brisbane, Australia,” he admits. “There’s quite a lot of work to be done to get it ready: it seems we have a lot of friends who all of a sudden want to come and visit!”
“I am really enjoying being retired,” he says. “But I’m not idle by any stretch of the imagination. I would quite like to go to the Spa Classic in May next year for Laranca BMW, I’ve worked a lot with them before. And I would be very surprised if I’m not at the Nürburgring 24 hours in some shape or form next year.”
Mahy’s route into racing was unconventional, as he describes: “I did a lot of karting and hillclimbing as a teenager and I always wondered whether I had enough ability to go any further. Anyway, in my mid-forties I was looking around for something to keep me busy and so I took my ARDS test and saw an advertisement for drivers to compete for Rogue Motorsport in the Toyota MR2 championship, so I took it up again then.
“I was looking for something to do and it turned out to be the best thing I ever did. I had so much fun, I met so many good people and I went racing all over the world. I managed to find something that I wasn’t too bad at – which was a real surprise for me!
Now 54, he leads the kind of life that many of his age would envy: “I would say I am probably about eighty-five to ninety percent recovered. I notice it most in the evenings; I get very tired and that’s difficult. But compared to where I was, it is unbelievable really. I mean, I am cycling about twenty kilometres every day and enjoying living life on my own terms.”
(Marcus Mahy was talking to Paul Truswell)
