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• Alan van der Merwe is a former racing driver turned F1 medical car driver.
• He was part of the crew that saved the life of Romain Grosjean.
• Alan has a long track record in racing.
• For more motorsports stories, visit www.Wheels24.co.za
The 2020 Bahrain Grand Prix will be forever remembered for the accident that nearly took the life of Romain Grosjean. However, one of the biggest talking points surrounding the incident is about a man who pulled the Haas driver out of the fiery accident. That man is Alan van der Merwe, a South African.
Alan has been tasked with driving the Formula 1 medical car since 2009 and has been doing his job with great success. When a race starts, Alan, accompanied by the FIA doctor, Dr. Ian Roberts, and other medical personnel, is the one who drives the Mercedes-AMG truck that follows the F1 car chain. The task is simple: stay behind the F1 cars and get the Drs to the crash site as quickly as possible.
For the past 12 seasons, Alan’s work seemed like fun (to the uninformed eye at least), but all of the year’s workouts and practices came to a head last night when Grosjean’s Haas caught fire immediately after hitting the barrier.
Van der Merwe said: “It was also a big surprise for us, we had never seen so much fire in 12 years. Romain started to get out of the car which was quite surprising after an accident like that. It was a relief to see that he was Well, it just shows that all the systems we developed worked hand in hand: the halos, the barriers, the seat belts, everything worked as it should.
“Without one of those things, it could have been a very different result.”
Who is Alan van der Merwe?
Alan, now 40, has been involved in motorsports his entire life. Growing up, he watched his father Bruce compete in various motorsport codes. It was at the age of 17 that Alan decided to start running, quite late, considering that children start racing at a very early stage. It was in 1998 that he entered the Dutch championship, followed by the British Formula Ford Slick 50 Championship the following year. After two seasons in karting, he made the leap into larger racing series, including Formula Ford and Formula 3.
In 2001, it won the Formula Ford Festival championship and in 2003, the British Formula 3 championship.
READ: SA racing driver Alan van der Merwe, part of the crew that rescued Romain Grosjean from a fierce F1 accident
In 2006 and 2007, he competed for the South African team in the A1 Grand Prix championship. Prior to competing in A1 GP, Alan also enrolled in the then-BAR Honda Young Driver program and completed various tasks for the team while developing his Formula 1 car. In 2005, he became the fastest F1 driver ever. , albeit unofficially. That year, in early November, at the Mojave airport in California, Alan posted a speed of 413.205 km / h in an F1 car. The highest in the history of the sport.
Although he never formally raced in F1, the opportunity to drive the medical car came in 2008. He accepted the new adventure in his career and lined up for the first race of the 2009 season. And the rest, as they say, is history.
FIA Medical Car driver Alan van der Merwe (left) and FIA Doctor Ian Robertson.
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