Felipe Massa’s Former Engineer Reveals the Horrifying Radio Message After His 2009 Crash

Rob Smedley spent years as one of Formula 1‘s most recognizable voices – the man on the other end of Massa’s radio, calm and direct through the chaos. But on a Saturday afternoon at the Hungaroring in July 2009, nothing in his career had prepared him for what came through his headset.

Smedley, who served as Massa’s race engineer throughout their time together at Ferrari, appeared on Jake Humphrey’s High Performance podcast to describe the moments after a roughly one-kilogram steel suspension spring detached from Rubens Barrichello’s Brawn car and struck Massa’s helmet at over 250 km/h. What followed was a sequence of events that still clearly weighs on him.

What Smedley Saw From the Pit Wall

At first, Smedley assumed the problem was nothing more than a routine mechanical issue. Watching his driver slow on the approach to turn five, he assumed an engine or gearbox had given up. He got on the radio. Nothing came back. Then engineers in the garage flagged something far stranger: Massa had both the brake and accelerator pressed to the floor simultaneously. The footage from inside the cockpit told its own grim story – Massa’s hands remained on the steering wheel as the car veered left, mounted the kerbs, and slammed into the tire barrier. That detail alone signaled something was catastrophically wrong. In a high-speed incident, no conscious driver keeps hold of the wheel through impact.

The initial theory on the pit wall was a bird strike. Flavio Briatore arrived carrying a blurry still image so dark and indistinct the team couldn’t make out what it showed. It took several more minutes before it became clear that something had separated from Barrichello’s car entirely.

Then the radio opened.

“His radio opens and there was this like awful, like, guttural moaning, you know what I mean? Somebody in a lot of pain. Like a lot of pain,” Smedley recalled on the podcast. He believes Massa wasn’t consciously pressing the transmit button – that it was pure muscle memory, a semi-conscious fumble that happened to open the channel. “I think he’s been fumbling round and somehow he’s just out of instinct has pressed that button and he’s opened it. He hasn’t saying anything. He is there’s just an awful guttural moaning and like there was this sudden realization that this is this is not normal.”

The method Smedley turned to in that moment had an unexpected origin – a workaround he had created simply because Massa was prone to excessive radio chatter. He had the radio technicians configure his station so he could cut the driver’s channel when needed. He used it immediately. “I turned it off like sort of to protect him. Yeah. To protect him. Also the team, ’cause the team could all hear it as well.”

The Hospital, the Coma, and What Came After

Budapest’s military hospital, where Massa was taken by helicopter, is home to some of the foremost head trauma specialists anywhere in the world, according to Smedley. He underwent surgery that evening, and neither Smedley nor the performance engineer assigned to Massa’s car were considered fit to stay at the circuit. They went to the hospital instead. The BBC relayed a private message to those gathered there: “We were told on the BBC, ‘Don’t repeat this, please, to the public, but that his life is really in danger here. He’s, you know, this is a life-threatening accident.'”

Ferrari chairman Luca de Montezemolo made the trip to Budapest and remained at the hospital through Sunday night. By then Massa had been placed in an induced coma. He spent nine days in that hospital in total, two of them unconscious, and underwent two separate operations – a second procedure carried out a month later in Brazil to insert a plate above his left eye, where the spring had struck. His helmet, a Schuberth, had taken the full force of the impact and almost certainly saved his life.

By the time Smedley came back to see Massa the next weekend, his head had swollen to approximately double its usual size and was covered in bruising. He initially spoke only Portuguese, didn’t recognise his own engineer, and at one point was convinced he drove for McLaren. Once recognition returned, Massa’s first priority was to get a message to team boss Stefano Domenicali: he’d be back in the car the following week and available for a Monday test session.

Smedley was not laughing. “I remember thinking to myself, I don’t know whether I want to do this anymore really, it was quite an emotional time for me.” The grief he had already carried from losing his daughter Minnie gave the near-fatal accident an added meaning, deepening both his connection to Massa and his doubt about whether he could continue dedicating himself to Formula 1. He did eventually decide to stay. He’s glad he did.

It’s worth noting: Massa’s wife was pregnant with their son at the time of the crash. Massa returned to race for Ferrari in 2010, his career continuing for another eight seasons. The incident, alongside the death of Henry Surtees two weeks earlier in a British Formula Two race, became a catalyst for cockpit safety research that ultimately produced the Halo device, introduced ahead of the 2018 season.