“I was thinking, ‘Mother******* broke my front wing’”: da Matta recalls crash with deer, and more, in Racers Unchained

Cristiano da Matta’s life changed in the blink of an eye during a Champ Car test at Road America in the summer of 2006.

The 2002 Champ Car champion, who was into the second year of his American open-wheel racing return after an F1 stint with Toyota, was testing with RuSport when a deer jumped onto the track as he headed towards Turn 6.

“I remember seeing the deer, and it was crossing the track from my left to my right,” he tells Paul Tracy in the lastest episode of Racers Unchained. “I tried to go to the all the way to the left, but I remember my right front wing hit it. And last thing I remember, I was thinking, ‘mother****** broke my front wing.’  And then (I) shut off. If I had died, or anything similar, I wouldn't even get to know man, because everything just switched off.”

The initial impact pitched the deer back into the cockpit, striking da Matta in the head. He was airlifted to a nearby medical center where he underwent surgery to remove a subdural hematoma, and was then placed into an induced coma while the swelling subsided.

After about six weeks he was able to leave hospital, and was well enough to give the command to start engines at the Road America race in late September. But the true recovery proved to be a much longer process.

“The doctor told my dad, ‘It's important your son has to do the rehab on his nature language, because if he does it in English… he's already a bit messed up there, so if he does it in English it might mess (his speech) completely. So you have to do it in Portuguese," he recalls.

“So I started doing everything with the people they told me to do it with here (in Brazil), and it takes forever.

“I went to the Long Beach race in ’07 and I was thinking ‘Man, I’m 100% fine now, and I’m ready to get back in the race car.’

“I tried to get back to the to the rehab, and I didn't know which floor it was anymore. I got there, and I was like, ‘Which button should I press in the elevator? Man, yeah, I think I'm still a little bit messy.’

“One of these doctors kept on telling me all the time: ‘You always think you're on the top of your game, because it's kind of a mind protection. Is the mechanism that goes into your mind. It's kind of protecting your body. So you always think you're 100%, but you may not be.

“I remember at the beginning when I actually started the rehab, I thought I was 100% already. One week later, I thought, ‘last week, I thought it was 100% but look, now I started getting this rehab done, now I'm 100%.’

“And then that kept, kept on going on and on and on for months, up until ’07 I used to have the same feeling.”

Da Matta never raced a Champ Car again, but he did return to the cockpit in other forms of racing. Hear the full story about that, plus what he's doing now, in this episode of Racers Unchained.