Maria de Villota: “The worst is now behind me”
Three months after her accident during aerodynamic tests for the Marussia team, Maria de Villota, who lost her right eye and still suffers from other injuries, is on the cover of the Spanish magazine ¡Hola! and looks back on the consequences of the accident.
Victim of a terrible accident aboard the Marussia MR-01 during tests at the Duxford aerodrome last July, Maria de Villota agreed to talk about the aftermath of her accident in the columns of the Spanish magazine ¡Hola!: « I remember everything, even the moment of the impact. When I woke up in the hospital with everyone around me, I started speaking in English as if I thought it was a FIA medical check. My father said to me: “Maria, please speak Spanish, your mother doesn’t understand half of what you’re saying,” and then I realized everything: what had happened, where I was, and why. »
The Spanish pilot, however, did not emerge unscathed from the Duxford accident, losing her right eye and being forced to undergo several cosmetic surgeries: “At first, they had covered my eye, so I couldn’t see it. The first day I looked at myself in the mirror, I had 140 stitches on my face, it was as if they had been made with a boat rope, and I had lost my right eye. I was terrified. I have to undergo more operations soon, but the worst is now behind me,” confides the Spaniard, even though she still suffers from headaches and has also lost her sense of smell and taste.
If she admits that she does not know if she will ever be able to compete again given the aftermath of the accident, she intends to work on improving driver safety so that such an accident cannot happen again: « We all want to see if there are lessons to be learned from what happened so that we can prevent such accidents in the future. I want to help in the future and improve safety, especially during aerodynamic tests because everything is under control on the circuits, but not during this kind of testing. » Indeed, for the record, Maria de Villota had crashed into a truck parked not far from the rudimentary facilities that then served as a stand.
But Maria de Villota mainly learned an important life lesson: I have won my greatest race, the race for life. During the period that followed, I understood many things. Although I only have one eye, I perceive more than before. At first, my life was a whirlwind, an incessant fight against the clock, while now I manage to see reality in a completely different way. […] Now, it’s no longer the tenths of a second that interest me: I’ve finally learned to savor the little pleasures of life.
