FIST quits China GT over rescue failures after car fire, organizers apologize

The China GT championship is facing a crisis of trust after a car fire in Shanghai, with FIST Team AAI announcing on the night of the accident that it is quitting all future China GT rounds and the series organizers issuing an apology a day later, following a collision in the GT3 race on September 5 that left a driver badly injured.

about 20 minutes into the race, the number 33 BMW and the number 37 Ferrari collided approaching turn 14 and slid toward the hairpin, clipping FIST Team AAI's number 91 Ferrari, which caught fire after a side impact and brought out the red flag, and Dutch driver Loek Hartog then abandoned his own race, stopped his number 79 Porsche, ran to the burning car, tried to help from both the driver's side and the other side, grabbed a fire extinguisher handed to him by a marshal to suppress the flames, and pulled British driver Oliver Millroy from the cockpit, with about 49 seconds passing from when he left his car to when the rescue was done.

Millroy later revealed on social media that the crash left him with five broken ribs, plus fractures to his collarbone, hand and fingers and a bruised lung, requiring surgery, and that he lost about an hour of memory around the accident, while he thanked Hartog for saving his life, and the organizers' statement apologized, expressed sympathy to Millroy and the other drivers involved, and thanked Hartog for being first on the scene, while conceding that a preliminary review showed the event met national-level configuration but that detailed management still needs improvement.

FIST Auto, however, published a strongly worded statement questioning the organizers' emergency response and medical support, pointing in particular to a live broadcast that wrongly reported Millroy had left his car on his own, contradicting what actually happened, and accusing the organizers of not deploying medical resources fast enough and of failing to issue any official apology to the team, which it described as reckless, a violation of industry standards and a heavy blow to the trust of teams, drivers' families and racing professionals, so the team announced it is withdrawing from all future China GT series until the organizers complete a full, independent and public investigation and give a formal reply.

One accident has put a racing hero and a rescue failure on display at the same time, with Hartog's 49-second rescue saving a life even as it exposed the gaps in the official rescue effort and in the live broadcast, and although the organizers promised to review and fix the organization, support, emergency response and medical care, they have yet to publish a detailed rescue timeline or an investigation conclusion, which leaves open the question of whether any claim of national-level configuration can calm the doubts when a driver's life is the bottom line.