How Grasser’s chief mechanic Noah Folie experienced the pit stop accident at Zandvoort and why he is taking the risk again despite his serious injury
It was the misfortune of the 2024 DTM season: Grasser chief mechanic Noah Folie seriously injured his leg at the pit stop of Luca Engstler’s Lamborghini at Zandvoort and needed surgery. But just three months later, the 29-year-old was back in the pits at the Sachsenring with the impact wrench – and made the stops two seconds faster!
“It was clear to me that I would do it again,” “I think it would have been different if I was ready for the pit stop in my position – and then you get hit.”
But on June 8, 2024, unfortunate circumstances led to the dramatic incident at Folie. How did the long-standing Grasser mechanic experience it himself?
“The car itself didn’t even hit me,”
“I went out and put the tire down,” he says. ‘Then I noticed that something was wrong with the hose of the impact wrench. I looked up, and the arms were twisted.’ So while Folie was trying to get the arm of the wrench into the correct position, Engstler was already on his way to the stop.
But his view was obscured because he was directly behind a rival. “If someone is standing in your way, you can’t brake,” says Folie, who never blamed Engstler. “So I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
What was previously unknown: Folie was not injured because he was rammed by Engstler’s Lamborghini. “I saw the car coming, but the car itself didn’t hit me at all,“ he says. ‘I was leaning against the car, so to speak, and it turned me away. And then I only landed on one foot.’
”I immediately felt a cracking sound”
If he had turned “a little less, I would have landed on my back. A little more, and I would have been standing on both feet.” But as it was, he only landed on one leg, twisted his ankle outwards and immediately felt “a crack. I knew immediately what had happened.”
While his colleagues tried to get the stop over the line, he was in severe pain, “crawling towards the pits. Because I couldn’t get up,” Folie describes the anxious moments.
The accident victim was taken to the Medical Center immediately, and a fibula fracture was later discovered in the hospital. Nevertheless, the Grasser head mechanic decided to fly to Milan on Sunday to have the procedure performed at a private clinic not far from his home in Bolzano. “On Monday at 10 o’clock I had already been operated on – it was really quick,” he says.
Grasser crew two seconds faster on their comeback
Everything went according to plan – and with intensive physiotherapy, the man from Eppan near Bolzano fought his way back into the Grasser crew. And how! The day after Folie’s comeback, the team achieved a stop time of 7.1 seconds at the Sachsenring with Engstler, whereas previously they usually needed more than nine seconds. This also has to do with his experience, as the Italian has been operating the Grasser impact wrench on the left side since 2022.
The accident was also a wake-up call. “Every now and then you need a reminder of what you actually do every day,” he says today, looking back. “And that it really is a dangerous job. You really have to pay attention – and you forget that after a few years because it becomes routine and so little happens.”
Does he do anything differently during a pit stop today? “I take a closer look when crossing from one side to the other,” he grins.
