New Hand Controls Allow Paralyzed Corvette Racer Robert Wickens to Compete in IMSA—But What About the Road?

Robert Wickens looked to be on the cusp of mainstream racing stardom. The Canadian who began his career in typical championship-winning karting fashion had claimed the Formula BMW USA rookie of the year award by the time he was 16 years old, winning the championship the following season. By the time he was 22, he had finished second in the final standings of the FIA’s European Formula 2 series (not to be confused with GP2 of the time, which evolved into today’s F2) and GP3 and claimed the Formula Renault 3.5 championship title. In 2011, he appeared in a Formula 1 practice session driving for the now defunct Marussia Virgin team and drove in the F1 season-ending young drivers’ test for both Marussia Virgin and Lotus-Renault.

But making it to the top of Europe’s single-seater ranks is loaded with obstacles—financial, political, and otherwise—even for drivers loaded with talent, and Wickens’ best next opportunity saw him racing for Mercedes in Germany’s DTM tin-top series against familiar names like former F1 race winners Ralf Schumacher and David Coulthard, ex-F1 driver Timo Glock, current F1 driver Esteban Ocon, sports car stalwarts Joey Hand and Tom Blomqvist, and plenty of others. Between 2012 and 2017, he scored six pole positions and won six races in an incredibly competitive series, with a best championship finish of fourth, in 2016.

Finally, IndyCar

In 2017, Wickens made a one-off practice appearance for Schmidt Peterson Motorsports at Road America, as a substitute for waylaid regular driver Mikhail Aleshin. He didn’t race that weekend, but SPM signed him to a full-time ride in 2018, and Wickens promptly claimed pole position for the season opener on the streets of St. Petersburg, Florida. He led every lap of the race except the final two after a collision, putting in a mega performance. After 13 of the year’s 17 races, he sat an impressive sixth in points, having claimed Indianapolis 500 Rookie of the Year honors and four podium finishes. At 29, he looked like he was finally home, finally in the big-time arena to stay. And then the series arrived at Pocono Raceway for a 200-lap, 500-mile high-speed oval-track contest on August 19.

The Sunday afternoon event had covered all of seven laps when Wickens’ car contacted Ryan Hunter-Reay’s, catapulting the Canadian’s Dallara-Honda skyward and into the track’s catch fencing. It’s the IndyCar Series’ most feared, terrifying, and destructive type of crash scenario, and it tore the car to pieces as the chassis flat-spun several times in the air before crashing underside-first back onto the track. Luckily, the driver’s carbon-fiber survival cell held together, and Wickens was conscious, but he was badly hurt. His career appeared finished.

All Change

“I ended up paralyzed at the T4 level, along with two broken arms, two broken legs, broken hands, and spinal fractures in my C7, C6 vertebrates, T2, 3, 4, 5, 6, as well as compression fractures in my entire lumbar spine,” Wickens says now. “And then the paralysis came from a contusion on my spinal cord at the T4 level. Everything else was recoverable [from] except for spinal cords in the human body. The bruise doesn’t heal. It turns into scar tissue and then nerves can’t pass through cleanly, which limits your mobility.

“I was in a medically induced coma for 10 days,” Wickens continues. “I was woken up from that and slowly started to learn this new world. It took a long time mentally before I understood the magnitude of everything. I did 11 months of rehab at a facility called Craig Hospital in Denver. Trying to get any neurological generation I could get. ... With a spinal cord injury, you can’t give a prognosis because there isn’t one. You and I, we could both have T4 incomplete spinal cord injuries. I might work out six hours a day, six days a week, which I did. And you might sit in your hospital bed and eat cheeseburgers all day—and you might walk out of the hospital and I don’t.”

Wickens explains the agonizingly slow process of 1-millimiter-per-day nerve regeneration: “Imagine your spinal cord is a highway, right? Each vertebra is an exit ramp to your arms, to your whatever muscles. It all happens in sections. For me, I had normal neurological abilities to my T4. And then from there, it’s basically from the chest down where none of the nerves could pass through. And then I was paralyzed from that point. But what the human body’s great at is, it can basically tee off of other nerves and start building again, bypassing the blockage. And that’s where there’s a lot of regeneration. You can imagine from your chest to your toes, that’s a lot. It takes a while. So that was the hardest thing.”

After three months, he was able to wiggle a toe, then move a hip. Medical approval came for him to begin rehabbing, but after so many months of immobility, Wickens also faced the daunting prospect of needing to rebuild a huge amount of muscle mass. He weighed 169 pounds when he started the Pocono race. By the time the rehab process began, he was down to 117.

“I opted for the aggressive strategy of just putting in the work, which in my whole life, I feel like that’s been my motto,” he says. “I felt like I always had to work harder than competitors from karting right up to cars. I didn’t have the stereotypical path to success. I didn’t come from family funding. I didn’t have really any corporation behind me until I was picked up by Red Bull and the Red Bull Junior Team in 2006. And they took me over to Europe, and they paved my path. But once I was released from that program, I was back scraping for my life and having to work harder than everyone else again.

“And then in recovery, I just saw it as the same thing,” he continues. “When they asked me how much I wanted to work out, I said, ‘As much as possible.’ They said, ‘Well, the gym’s open from 8 to 4,’ or whatever it was. And I was like, ‘Perfect. Sign me up for that. I’ll take an hour-long lunch and get back at it.’”

See All 7 Photos7

New Way of Life

Relatively early during his rehab, Wickens posted social media videos charting his progress, showing him regaining some movement in his lower extremities. Just more than a year after his crash, he married his fiancée, Karli, standing on his own and dancing at their wedding, and they welcomed their first child in the summer of 2022. After approximately three years of post-crash rehab and strengthening, he decided it was time to try to race again. Still, he says his paralysis hasn’t improved since 2020. Yes, he can stand and take steps with the assistance of a walker, with some of his limitations being down to a lack of hip and core strength that’s difficult for him to maintain. That makes it tough to keep his balance on two feet, “So I always need to be holding onto something to anchor myself in a way,” he says. “But yeah, I can stand myself up using upper body strength to get up, and then I can do dishes, I can cook some food, I can reach for plates. I feel like as far as paralysis goes, I’m extremely fortunate to get back what I did.”

But How to Go Racing Again?

In 2022, Bryan Herta Autosport signed the driver to compete in the TCR class of the IMSA Michelin Pilot Challenge, driving a Hyundai with hand controls on the steering wheel. Wickens found quick success, finishing third in his first race back, at Daytona International Speedway alongside teammate Mark Wilkins. The duo won a couple more races then clinched the championship in 2023. But while Wickens isn’t the first physically limited driver to use hand controls in races, he found the existing technical solutions had frustrating limitations of their own.

The first such setup was one that paralyzed driver Michael Johnson used at Herta, but it was strictly a mechanical design. It featured a ring on the back of the steering wheel that, when squeezed, used a series of linkages to actuate the car’s standard brake pedal. Because race cars don’t typically feature power-assist brakes, the system employed a pneumatic actuator that opened a pressure valve when a certain amount of brake pressure was produced, which then acted on the brake pedal. It worked, but it inherently had some latency in it. That’s the last thing you want from your brakes, and it produced inconsistent performance and a general lack of feel through the driver’s fingers. Wickens wanted something that felt more like a hydraulic master-cylinder racing-brake system in its responses.

See All 7 Photos7

If you have experience on racetracks or even drive racing games on a home gaming simulator using pedals, you might know the same thing the pros do: The way you use the brakes—how you apply them into a turn, how you release them—is critical, the most important skill the world’s best drivers employ to take corners as quickly as possible. This is why load-cell brake pedals are a big thing in sim racing, as they respond based on pressure as opposed to cheaper, potentiometer-based toy pedals that react simply to pedal position.

In both the real and virtual worlds, brakes aren’t only for stopping; when you’re trying to control a car’s balance on the limit, you rely massively on feel to manipulate a chassis’ pitch and yaw to make it turn as well as you can. This hand-operated braking system didn’t offer much in that regard, and what it did offer wasn’t the sensation a race car driver is used to. Worse, the latency inspired little confidence and could be dangerous.

“I was convinced, when I applied the brake, I didn’t actually get brakes for a significant period of time,” Wickens explains. “The engineers were like, ‘No, we see your brake pressures, everything’s the same.’ There was no travel sensor on the brake ring. So finally one day at a test, we took a damper-pot off of one of the corners of the car and clipped it onto the brake ring, and then they noticed, like, ‘Oh, shit, actually, there’s 0.7-second [of a delay] sometimes from when the brake ring moves before brake pressure is actually applied.’ As you can imagine, if you’re going 150+ mph, [let alone racing wheel to wheel with other people] ... ”

The Solution

Enter Bosch, the global engineering firm that is one of the automotive sector’s most ubiquitous suppliers. The company figured the technology it was using in hybrid prototype racing in IMSA’s GTP and the FIA World Endurance Championship's Hypercar hybrid-powered prototype classes could help. Those cars use an electronic by-wire rear braking system that works in conjunction with their e-hybrid units, so near the end of the 2024 season, Bosch adapted it for all four corners on the Hyundai Elantra TCR car.

Wickens now could realistically set his eyes on moving into the IMSA WeatherTech series, North America’s premier sports car division, for 2025. Suddenly, the issue of who would pay to develop such a system and figure out how to install it in race cars was mostly solved. “Bosch was willing to provide that technology as a package for me to any car I wanted to drive,” Wickens says. “From there, it was just talking to the teams, the OEMs, to do the adaptation portion.”

The version used in the Hyundai wasn’t a full brake-by-wire system, but rather it featured a hydraulic input to the electronic braking modules. When Wickens moved into the IMSA GTD class for this season with DXDT Racing and a Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.R, beginning with April’s Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach, the car rolled onto the Southern California street circuit with a new, full by-wire evolution that knows how much brake pressure to distribute based on how much travel Wickens puts into steering wheel’s brake paddles (actually shaped more like a butterfly bar than traditional paddles). Latency is no longer a thing, and as for the problem of lacking feel? A damper connects the paddles together and provides a sensation akin to that of a traditional hydraulic brake system, exactly what Wickens had longed for. (There’s also a physical hydraulic emergency brake hand lever mounted in the center console, a backup in case an onboard power failure renders the wheel controls useless.)

See All 7 Photos7

Combined with paddles for shifting and L-shaped bars/paddles for accelerating (Wickens says this gives him more finite throttle control with his fingers similar to how your foot slides on a conventional gas pedal), and because the Corvette GT3.R already uses an electronically automated clutch, he’s finally able to exert most of the precise inputs into a race car on the limit that not long ago seemed far away on the horizon, if at all.

And if you wonder, he generally uses the left-side throttle actuator so he can upshift with his right hand, and the right-side brake actuator so he can downshift with his left, keeping the shift paddles in their traditional locations as found on just about every road and race car. But he has those throttle and brake devices on both sides of the wheel, meaning he can always reach one of them even if he has so much steering angle applied in a corner that it makes it difficult for one of his hands to reach the relevant controls on one side or the other. Both sides of the brake and throttle controls are linked in terms of how much input they command at any given moment, making it a non-issue to seamlessly switch which hand is in command without causing jerkiness.

“It’s an amazing system, and my first laps in the Corvette, it was a huge step forward. ... I do all my braking just with my right hand to free up my left hand and downshift, but that old system was meant to have both hands pull on the brake ring, and it could flex and bind and was inconsistent,” Wickens says. “The Corvette, with just the brake damper and the electronic sensor for its travel, is the same every time. It’s super consistent. I finally have that pure hydraulic feeling with the damper and bump rubbers and packers they put in it. Hindsight [is always something], but I think if I had something like this from the beginning of my TCR career, I would’ve won a lot more races.”

See All 7 Photos7

The system still isn’t perfect, though, and it even has a bit of a video game element to it. “I definitely have the feel,” Wickens acknowledges. “But it took some time, don’t get me wrong, and I’m still getting adapted to it. One area where let’s say it’s still lacking: GT3 cars have ABS, and obviously, if you apply ABS through the brake system that the car is built with, you get haptic feedback that tells you ABS is active when it pulses the brake pedal. I don’t get any of that. There’s basically alarms on the dash that light up indicating when you’re in ABS, but that’s the same for every driver in the Corvette [except they also feel it through the pedal], that’s not special for me. ... But speaking with some of the other drivers, some of my teammates, they also base their ABS [awareness] more off the lights than they do off the pedal feel. So I feel like I’m not at a disadvantage for something like that.”

Is he or can he be as quick now as he was pre-Pocono crash? “I think it depends on the track,” he says. “I obviously started racing with my feet when I was seven years old, go-karts, and just perfecting braking techniques, throttle applications, everything for 20-odd years before I was paralyzed. So what I’m still struggling with, which I think is coming with experience, is just consistency at 98 percent and up to the limit. I’m optimistic it’s going to continue to get better and better. It’s just not as repeatable yet as it was when I was using my feet.”

See All 7 Photos7

A Roadgoing Future?

Racing is where this all began, and a steering wheel controls package like this—for the record, it only adds about 40 pounds—may allow additional physically limited competitors to participate in motorsports. But according to research published in the American Journal of Public Health, paralysis affects an estimated 5.4 million Americans alone—most of whom are not race car drivers—so the bigger and more relevant question is, might it make its way into road cars?

Today’s existing hand control systems remain rudimentary mechanical devices, more like what Johnson had used, and prior to him the conventional handbrake that former IndyCar and F1 driver Alex Zanardi used to race GT cars after losing both his legs in an IndyCar crash in 2001. Wickens’ own wheelchair-accessible street vehicle features a simple push-pull hand control lever that pushes a rod on the gas and brake pedals. Thus, plenty of the same issues exist with it that make a similarly simple design severely compromised in a race car. Even worse, it also requires the driver to always have one hand on the controls and only one hand on the wheel. That might be generally OK for a power boat or a jet, but it’s not the best or safest solution for operating a car in traffic.

“I would love nothing more than to have just a better ergonomic system for everyday use with people with disabilities,” Wickens says. “When you spec out a car, why can’t there be a box for hand controls? Why can’t it just be an option? I feel like an equal amount of people would probably click hand controls as they would a $20,000 carbon-fiber package.”

It’s a strong point, and from Bosch’s side, it’s not out of the question, though it doesn’t have immediate plans to attempt to implement such a thing with automakers. For now, the company either can’t or won’t cite a cost for the equipment as used in Wickens’ race cars, as most of the expense was incurred in developing the software and electronics and not any overly complex hardware.

“On the racing side, it’s definitely something we're evaluating, putting together a system for other drivers and their applications and making it more of a kit that could go into different race cars,” says Bosch’s Jordan Krell, who has been heavily involved in the project from day one. “That's kind of phase three we’re working toward and evaluating at this point. ... We have had interest [from other racing drivers].

Surely, though, there’s a market and a legitimate need for this outside racetracks’ confines?

“For us, it’s pretty early in the project to understand where the end point of this is,” Krell says. “[But] we want to advance mobility and give everyone the same opportunities that an able-bodied driver would have both on track and on the road. ... It’s definitely technology that could be applicable to the street—it’s just how well does it scale for those applications? But there are a lot of advancements in braking right now. Our [electronic braking] module has roots back to road car devices, and so there are a lot more technologies coming online with cars that can be leveraged for this. We see this as paving the way for thinking in new ways about how you do that. By proving it can be done in a race car, it shows it can be done in a road car. ... If we show we can brake at the limit for a car running the Nürburgring 24-hour race, it shows it can work for pretty much any other application.”

Speaking of the famed German track and its annual around-the-clock endurance event—and as if to demonstrate the ultimate proof of concept—Wickens made history there on June 22 when he took the checkered flag in his Bryan Herta Autosport Hyundai Elantra N in second place in the TCR class. The feat made him the first competitor driving with hand controls to finish on the Nürburgring 24’s podium. He’s scheduled to compete next in his DXDT Corvette Z06 GT3.R in IMSA’s Chevrolet Grand Prix at Canadian Tire Motorsports Park, July 11–13.