Miami Grand Prix doctors bring racing passion, trauma expertise to trackside care

If there’s a serious crash during a race at the Miami Grand Prix, drivers need the best care as quickly as possible.

Thankfully, the team of doctors at Jackson Memorial Hospital who are working the race are uniquely qualified.

Dr. Antonio Marttos Jr. told Local 10’s Clay Ferraro on Friday that he grew up watching his hero, Ayrton Senna, race for championships.

Marttos was originally in school to be a plastic surgeon.

But after watching Senna lose his life in a crash in 1994, Marttos decided to change course and become a trauma surgeon.

“When he died, I realized I was supposed to become a plastic surgeon,” said Marttos. “His crash really changed my career.”

Marttos says that his first trackside assignment was a truck race in Brazil where a fiery crash forced a driver to leap and roll out of his burning vehicle.

He said he ended up face-to-face with the shaken driver — and with his own future in trauma medicine.

He’s now used his experience to design a fully functional training bay that mirrors the one used at the race track. It’s modeled after the meticulous choreography of a pit crew — only with much higher stakes.

Marttos leads the team of doctors from JMH who work the Miami Grand Prix.

Dr. Gabriel Ruiz is part of that team — and he’s also a race car driver himself.

“I’m a surgeon, so I like to work with my hands,” he said. “It also serves as a kind of relaxing thing for me to be working this job. This job is very stressful, so that’s how we decompress in the garage. And I’ve been working on it for a year, building it little by little, piece by piece, learning from people that know, and getting the car to what it is now.”

Ruiz races at Homestead and Sebring. He also built his own race car from scratch.

That dual perspective gives him unique insight.

“Yeah, it gives you the kind of perspective of what a driver goes through when they’re going around that, you know, 250 mph on the track,” Ruiz said.

Following a crash, seconds matter. And it’s hard to imagine anyone better or faster than the team from JMH.