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| Image courtesy of www.autosport.com |
Hello you, my name is Luca but you can call me Luca, and motorsport this season has been quite the enjoyable ride for myself in all disciplines. I am always looking toward not only the top level championships like Formula One, MotoGP, World Endurance, Touring Cars etc. but also as you know, looking down the ladder for the upcoming champions of tomorrow.
However back when I was just getting myself invested in just Formula One and not knowing too much about the junior formulae, I remember hearing about the battle going on for the 2010 Formula Two championship between now former F1 driver Jolyon Palmer and a guy named Dean Stoneman. Whoever ended up winning would participate in a young driver test with the Williams F1 team at the Yas Marina circuit in Abu Dhabi after the season had concluded.
Stoneman ended up winning the championship, he participated in the young driver test and was poised to race for the following year in the Formula Renault 3.5 series alongside now Red Bull F1 race winner Daniel Ricciardo, but was forced to withdraw after Stoneman was diagnosed with very severe testicular cancer.
From what I had been researching, Stoneman's cancer was so severe that he was scheduled to go in for treatment immediately and very nearly had to have his legs amputated, with it having been Stage IV which had spread to his lungs and abdomen. This story as you can probably already tell, has a happy ending and Dean is still thankfully alive and seemingly in good health, despite a few of the side effects that continue to plague him, that being lack of feeling in his legs.
What followed has been a remarkable story, Stoneman returned to motor racing in 2012 competing in powerboat racing (Where his father Colin had been a previous champion), with the aim of returning to full fitness. Stoneman went on to claim the championship in P1 SuperStock UK championship that same year and he was fully focused on getting back into cars, and made his return with the BTCC support series Porsche Carrera Cup GB for 2013.
This is where it hits close to home for me because I went to Croft that year with the sole intention of meeting Deano. His return to car racing had caused many strong headlines as he was setting the world alight with his Carrera Cup results, including a double win on his debut at Brands Hatch. He maintained a strong level of results, including a win the day before I attended the Croft BTCC race day event, before seemingly taking victory on that day, though later he got excluded.
Dean was disqualified for a very aggressive manoeuvre on reigning champion Michael Meadows and the rails came off of his championship charge, with a race meeting ban after accumulating too many points on his racing licence for overly aggressive racing. He ended up fifth in the final championship results, which was an incredible effort anyway considering the circumstances, and I believed Stoneman would have a great GT career ahead of him since an enclosed cockpit of a single seater may prevent him from moving his legs around as much as he needed. I was wrong.
In the twilight of that year, Stoneman was drafted in to race in the season finale for the GP3 championship in Abu Dhabi, with the intention to just be there to test the car after the event. Stoneman surprised everyone with a very respectable sixth place in race one which meant a third place start for the second race, and improving to second place in the race. Again, one remarkable result and propelled Stoneman right back in the thick of it in single seaters, looking at an attempt to reconquer.
For 2014, Stoneman remained in GP3 and took victories at Catalunya, Spa and Monza with the Manor team before jumping ships to Koiranen (who he raced for in the previous year's final round) and taking further victories at Sochi and Yas Marina. He ended the year second in the championship behind Alex Lynn, and was snatched up by the ever trying Red Bull Junior Team at the expense of Lynn for the following year.
Back where he had intended to go before he had to stop racing, Formula Renault 3.5 for 2015 and Dean delivered some very respectable results but not setting the world alight, and after a late bargain in GP2 in the latter part of that year, Stoneman didn't look set to make it to Formula One. So he began looking over the Atlantic, and sealed himself a drive in the IndyCar feeder series Indy Lights with the Andretti Autosport squad for 2016.
This gamble looked to have paid off, as Dean Stoneman took two victories including the Freedom 100, Indy Lights' equivalent of the Indianapolis 500 after an incredible last-lap battle with eventual 2016 Indy Lights champion Ed Jones, separated by 0.0022 at the line! He finished fifth in the championship and as far as I am aware, spent this year pretty much on the side-lines with only a guest drive in the Blancpain GT Series.
I know this is almost written out like a Wikipedia page but I want to get across how great of a driver Dean is and that he deserves a race seat in IndyCar and I so hope he does get one. With the Carlin team moving into IndyCar as early as next year, I'd love to see Dean as well as another great British driver who I have had the fortune of meeting, Jack Harvey possibly race for them, though I'm aware Carlin already have one drive taken so it would have to be between those two for the other ride. Either way, I'd hope they both make it into IndyCar full time but I am talking of course here about Dean.
With this incredible story about his recovery, and considering IndyCar being an American sport, I think Stoneman would fit perfectly over there when you take into account the coverage he would get. Which sounds quite shallow without context but considering sponsorship plays a huge part in helping drivers get into racing, I don't think it's particularly wrong to say it.
Of course if there's anything I can say, it's that Dean Stoneman isn't just "the racing driver who had cancer", it happened and it derailed probably a much more successful career but he has risen above it. He doesn't deserve to have the wheels come off of his racing car, and the moral of this article is that neither does anyone else.
I purposely wanted to write this for a November release, since we now are all thinking about cancer awareness. Cancer affects all of us whether it be actually us or someone we love, and whether that battle is lost or won, things are never the same but it's always up to us to overcome it.
Speaking for myself, my mum had cancer back when I was too young to understand, and thankfully she is alive and well to this day, and I feel like if I didn't have her, my life would have turned out so incredibly differently and not in any way for the better. I can't speak really for the countless families because I was too young to understand what was going on and it wasn't until years later that I learned of the gravity of the situation.
At the time and over time, I didn't suffer the emotional trauma of the possibility of my mum dying and of course she is still alive so it's no place of mine to speak on behalf of the countless numbers out there. I do however know that I will more than likely go through it in some way, and I think I'll be ready and I'll try and rise above it, whatever form it takes.
My hope is one day, maybe in my lifetime or maybe not, that cancer can be beaten. But until then, take it from Dean Stoneman as one of the many examples of rising above this awful disease, thank you all for reading.
Personal update: Hello everyone, hope you enjoyed my article. So it has been a fair few weeks after my last blog post saying I'd take a break. I am motivated to write and I have a few ideas for articles to write here, but I'd be lying if I said everything was perfect, because of course it never is.
I'm still absolutely furious and devastated about the new Kingsman movie and how they've disrespected the characters and the cult following, and I have not budged. My petition now has over 550 supporters (Link here if you'd like to sign: https://www.change.org/p/matthew-vaughn-bring-back-roxy-in-kingsman) and I also volunteered to write for LRM Online about it all, which I believe is my best work yet (Link to that here: http://lrmonline.com/news/how-kingsman-the-golden-circle-screwed-over-female-fans/).
I wrote an email to Marv films a few days ago and I'll be phoning them on Monday to see if they got it. This will not go away for me as this means too much to me, I know my own state as I do reset back into getting incredibly worked up about this and it's the new norm for me with something distracting me and lifting me up temporarily, but it's manageable. I have some amazing and supportive people around me and I can smile despite this shitty situation. I won't be making a habit of these rambling personal updates.
We all fight our own little battles, I just chose to make mine public because I needed a way out. Where I can put my thoughts and not go nuts, of course there's a privacy line but I know where to cross it, at least I would hope that I do. So I appreciate a lot of you who were concerned for me, and I will want to continue posting at the rate that I wanted to, at least three articles per month, but I won't push myself considering the circumstances.
Thank you again everyone, so until we meet again,
Luca.
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