The day was Sept. 15, 2001. That’s when Alex Zanardi suffered one of the most horrific crashes in the history of auto racing.
The Italian lost control of his open-wheel car at the American Memorial (a German race renamed after Sept. 11) coming out of a pit stop, it slid into the track among 200mph traffic and was t-boned by another car.
“One piece of the car went on one side,” Zanardi told NBC in 2014, “and the other one with another bit of Alex went into a different direction>”
Zanardi lost both of his legs.