As a new F1 season starts today, racing legend John Surtees tells of the agonising decision he faced after his son's freak fatal accident
Henry's den is exactly as he left it. A drawer slightly open, the sleeve of a white shirt trailing out. Trainers and bags haphazardly piled on the floor.
A discarded T-shirt on a chair by his computer, as though he'd left it a moment earlier. Shelves lined with gold and silver trophies, the gleaming spoils of a ten-year career in motor sport.
And on a hanger in the corner, the racing suit he wore to achieve his first podium finish in Formula 2, one day before he died. At 18.
Ambitious: John encouraged Henry to race karts from the age of eight
'I suppose you think I'm being sentimental to leave it like this,' says Henry's father, John Surtees, standing in the room. But, no, sentimental is not the word. Heroic might be.
It was the decision of John and Jane Surtees, following the freakish accident that killed their son during a race at Brands Hatch on July 19 last year, to donate Henry's organs for transplant.
Jane, a former nurse, was convinced it was what her son would have wanted. John found the decision more agonising.
'My first instinct was: "Keep the lad whole." I hated the thought that someone such as George Best, who'd abused their body, would get bailed out by my son.'
But he changed his mind. Henry's organs saved five lives, including that of a six-month-old baby.
The supreme and terrible irony of the accident is that Surtees senior, 76, is a motor sport legend, the only man to win World Championships on two and four wheels, who competed at a time of grim, and often fatal, dangers and survived a life-threatening crash in Canada in 1965.
The perils of motor sport have been significantly reduced by decades of safety innovation, but nothing could legislate for the set of extraordinary twists of fate that took the teenager's life last summer.
By every analysis, Henry was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
'It was bizarre,' says his father. 'The race was restarted and Henry was put at the back of the grid after he had become stuck on a kerb.
Henry in the last Formula 2 series with two pit girls.
'It then so happened that among those back markers, a competitor crashed and, despite several things which should have prevented it, a wheel came off. Then that the wheel, having bounced on the track, struck Henry on the head.
'A similar thing happened in the F1 race the following week, when Felipe Massa was hit on the head and knocked unconscious by a loose spring. The difference was that the spring weighed one-and-threequarter pounds.
'Henry was hit by a wheel and assembly that weighed 62lb. So it was instantaneous. The car veered off and hit a barrier. But by that time Henry would have been technically dead.'
Despite the crash at 120mph, the car was not badly damaged. The medical team who reached him found his right tyre spinning furiously, his foot apparently still on the accelerator.
'When Jane and I reached the circuit's medical centre after the crash, we didn't know how Harry was. We knew nothing. But she asked questions and the answers made her feel we had a major tragedy on our hands.
'We were allowed to see him for just a moment and then he was airlifted to the Royal London Hospital, where they later confirmed to us that Henry had suffered what they called "catastrophic brain damage".
'It was then we met the lady who put forward the case for organ donation. There was no pressure at all. Our daughters, Leonora and Edwina, arrived late that night from their respective universities and they were very supportive.'
Says John: 'We were then able to see Henry, whose vital functions were being kept alive in the intensive care unit. He looked complete. A couple of black eyes, but, apart from that ...' 'In a way, that was nice,' says Jane. 'We still had time to say goodbye.
When we left the hospital, he was still there - pink. He wasn't all blue and cold.'
Leonora, Jane, John, Edwina and Henry at Goodwood's Festival of Speed two weeks before Henry's crash
Jane's decision, as she explains, was ultimately guided by her instinctive knowledge of Henry's own wishes.
'When it happens, it's so horrendous, you're not rational actually. But I remembered later that when Henry had applied for his provisional driving licence, he'd put a cross in a box to be an organ donor.
'But even without that memory, I knew what he would want anyway. We couldn't reach Edwina by phone at the time, but Leonora was most emphatic: "That's what Henry would have wanted."
'Just the thought of it: being cremated or rotting in a churchyard. I thought, "Well, at least this will go on and help someone." '
The help is desperately needed. A thousand people, three a day, die in this country while waiting for a suitable organ to be donated. Ten thousand people in the UK need an organ transplant, while just 3,500 transplants take place a year.
Abigail Martineau, of the Donor Transplant Co-ordination Service, in London, who spoke to the family in hospital, is hugely respectful of those people who decide, at the most stressful time of their lives, to think of the plight of others.
'Henry donated his heart valves, liver, kidneys and pancreas. Within hours - eight to 12 hours in the case of his liver - he had saved lives.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1257697/Racing-legend-John-Surtees-tells-agonising-decision-faced-sons-freak-fatal-accident.html#ixzz0iAf5wMIm
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