On Sunday, September 21, racers Derek Wagnon and Guillermo “Pops” Gonzalez were seriously injured in a chain-reaction crash coming onto the front straightaway of the 2.38-mile MotorSport Ranch (MSR) – Houston racetrack, in Angleton, Texas.
Roadracingworld.com was unsuccessful in its attempts to reach CMRA representatives on Monday and reported on the incident based upon information from eyewitness Marcus McBain, a former racer, former race team owner and long-time member of the motorcycle road racing community.
Earlier today, Roadracingworld.com was able to connect with CMRA Race Director Walter Walker, who has been busy attending to the injured riders and their families and took time to provide an update on their conditions and the incident on Sunday.
“First of all, I’m sorry I missed your call yesterday. Nancy [Selleck, CMRA Administrator) and I were both at the hospital checking on everyone,” Walker told Roadracingworld.com. “Derek is doing well. I saw him yesterday afternoon. He was in good spirits and laughing and talking. They’ve done some pretty good work on him already. He’s going back into surgery today to have some orthopedic stuff done on his leg and foot. He’ll have a couple of more [surgeries] down the road, but it sounds like the prognosis is pretty good. He’s going to be just fine and up and running in a few months, hopefully.
“The other rider who was involved [Guillermo Gonzalez], he’s still in ICU [Intensive Care Unit]. He has a pretty severe head injury. He’s being somewhat responsive today, this morning, from what I understand. We’re just going to have to wait and see. The [brain] swelling has to go down, this and that. It’s just a wait-and-see. I don’t have a lot more information on him.
“We had two other transports earlier in the day [Sunday, September 21]. One of those was an air evac, and both of those [riders] have been treated and released.
“We had four total transports the entire day. Three were by helicopter, two from the one incident [Wagnon/Gonzalez] and one from an earlier incident. Then we had a ground transport. The [riders] earlier in the day were treated and released and they’re doing fine. It’s just these two from this last one that we’re taking care of right now.”
Asked what happened Sunday at MSR-Houston, Walker said, “There’s a lot of crazy stuff going around right now on Facebook and the Internet, lots of local messages boards, and people are talking about what happened, what caused it. There’s folks talking about it that weren’t even there throwing out opinions and giving explanations, and it’s just crazy.
“Our policy, CMRA’s policy is we don’t release names and talk about incidents until we’ve got permission from the families or the riders themselves. And that’s kind of a universal policy with most racing organizations, and that’s what we were doing. We were both doing just that, but first and foremost we were seeing if they needed anything and that these guys were recovering and then getting permission to put out stuff like that. To be frank, I didn’t even think about talking to you guys. It didn’t even cross my mind. We were trying to deal with what we had in front of us.
“The incident with Derek and Guillermo is just one of those crazy things. A lot of people complain about that pit-straight wall, and it’s one of those things that we all hate to see at racetracks, but in a lot of places it’s just the way that things are built. We do put Airfence along that wall, but we position it for a head-on impact. If you’re coming out of the last turn and someone loses the front end or gets together and they go straight in, obviously we’ve got that five sections of Airfence set up to cover it for that.
“This thing happened much further down. Derek was almost parallel with the wall at that point. He was on a lap-record pace. He, quite frankly, would have shattered the lap record on that pass. He was coming to the finish line and he was cooking. Talking to him, he said, ‘I was well past where you would think you would normally fall.’ The rear end came around, then came back, and then it came around again, and the next thing you know he was rolling over the front of the bike. And he slid into the wall, but he didn’t really receive any injuries from hitting the wall because he slid into it and along it.
“But the guys who were right behind him, we’re talking split seconds. I think Marcus [McBain] said it was an eight-second gap. I was looking at the scoring gap from the last lap by, and he was 4.1 seconds ahead. I’m sure he stretched it out a bit coming to the line for that second lap, but it wasn’t that long. Nevertheless, there’s no time for riders to see any flags that would go up, which would be in the turn before. There was nothing we could have done. Two guys got around him [Wagnon], and the last guy in line, which was Guillermo, he had nowhere to go. Our grid officials said it looked like he tried everything he could to keep from hitting him and managed to run over his leg instead of running over his body. And then he [Gonzalez] took a huge tumble himself.
“It wasn’t really the impact with the wall that hurt [Wagnon]. It was getting run over by the bike that did the damage to his legs.
“It was his [Wagnon’s] left foot and ankle were severely injured, and his right foot was injured also. He had an open fracture and dislocation of the left ankle. I’ll be honest, it was almost detached. It was really bad. He had an open fracture on his right foot, the big toe area. The biggest thing was he lost quite a bit of blood. It was a huge open wound and he was bleeding pretty good.
“Everybody that was there were over the wall and on him as fast as we possibly could get to him. The medics were there in less than a minute. Then Joe Caruso, the guy (who) was running third in that race, he’s a vascular surgeon. He jumped over the wall. He was still in his leathers. He ran down and threw his gloves and his helmet off and jumped right in and took charge. He told the EMTs that, ‘I’m a doctor. I’m taking charge.’ And he just went to work. It was amazing watching that guy directing traffic. He got the bleeding stopped within seconds of getting there and went to work on getting him stabilized. I’m thankful that he was there. I truly believe that he saved Derek’s life because he could have easily bled out from that kind of injury.”
After the Wagnon/Gonzalez incident, the remainder of the day’s races were called off. Walker explained the situation, saying, “We keep two ALS [Advanced Life Support] units on site at all times for our events. So we had both units tied up with both patients. They immediately called for Care Flight. One had to come from Katy, Texas, and one came from downtown Houston. It took quite a bit of time to get those guys stabilized and packaged up and ready to fly. We spent quite a bit of time dealing with that and looking at the track and seeing what kind of clean-up we needed to do there.
“Some of our Board members came down and talked to me. They said, ‘It’s getting late in the day. The earlier incidents got us off schedule, and we have some guys who are tore up about this and don’t want to race.’ They had been talking to them [riders]. I said, ‘OK. What do you guys want to do?’ They said, ‘I think we should probably pull the plug, and we’ll deal with that later down the road.’ My feeling was to try and keep going, because I don’t think Derek and Guillermo would want us to shut the whole thing down for them. But looking at the schedule and the time and the faces…I called a riders’ meeting. After looking at the faces in the crowd, we probably needed to call it a day. And that’s what we did, just more out of respect for those guys and a lack of time to be able to finish the day. So we decided to call it off. There was no grumbling at all. They were like, that’s fine.
“We’re a family. Every member of this club we consider to be a member of our family. It’s a very personal thing when one of us gets hurt. One of the things I try to do is go check on riders who are at the hospital and talk to the families and offer them any kind of support that we can offer and anything that I can personally offer.”
For further comment, Roadracingworld.com reached John Orchard, the President of the CMRA Board of Directors, who said, “It’s something that was absolutely unfortunate. Our hearts go out to anybody that is involved, just like it would at any event. This one was no different in that regard. These particular ones were just more serious in nature than crashes typically are. By the nature of it we had to cancel the races for the rest of the day just with the way the schedule was and the seriousness of those events.
“The Board of Directors, we’re already reviewing everything that’s going on as far as what happened, what occurred, what’s the root cause of it, [and] areas where we potentially need to do better in the future. So we’re just reviewing the whole circumstance so that we get the lessons learned that we can and that we’ve got things as safe as they can be at any track that we go to, that we handle every situation as well as possible. We’re most concerned, to be honest, about the families and the individual racers themselves. That’s where the hearts and minds are across the whole organization.”