Heartpounding Footage Shows Racer Pulling Rival From a Burning Car Before Any Crew Arrived

nauFLe image via Shutterstock
nauFLe image via Shutterstock

Ollie Millroy's Ferrari burst into flames on a wet Shanghai racetrack last weekend.

No marshals and no fire crews reached him in time.

One rival driver stopped his car and climbed into the fire himself.

Hartog Stopped, Grabbed a Fire Extinguisher, and Went Into the Flames

The opening race of the China GT season turned into a pileup in seconds.

David Chen's Ferrari got clipped by Neil Verhagen's BMW in the wet grass at Turn 14, then speared straight into Ollie Millroy's Ferrari 296.

Millroy's car caught fire on impact, and for a moment nobody but Millroy was inside it.

Loek Hartog, driving a Porsche for a rival team, stopped on an active racetrack and ran back toward the wreck.

He tried the passenger door first.

When that didn't work, he grabbed a fire extinguisher, beat back the flames long enough to get the door open, and pulled Millroy out of the burning cockpit himself.

"There were moments where I didn't know I would actually be able to get Ollie out," Hartog said. "But this isn't about what I did."

Millroy Walked Away With Five Broken Ribs and a Debt He Says He Can Never Repay

Millroy suffered five broken ribs, a broken collarbone, a broken hand and finger, and a bruised lung.

He doesn't remember the thirty seconds before the crash or the hour after it.

What he does remember is who got him out.

"I am still alive tonight, entirely thanks to one man," Millroy said. "Loek Hartog stopped instantly with no flag marshals or fire crews in sight, and risked his own life to get me out of the car."

Formula 1 Already Learned This Lesson the Hard Way

None of this should have been news to anyone running a professional racing series in 2026.

Formula 1 driver Romain Grosjean split his car in half and burst into flames at the 2020 Bahrain Grand Prix, and he still spent 28 seconds clawing through fire before marshals reached him.

That crash is why every F1 car now races with a Halo bar bolted over the cockpit, and why a trained doctor rides in a dedicated medical car every single lap of every single race.

China GT had no Halo requirement forcing extra survival space into Millroy's Ferrari, and nothing resembling a doctor stationed anywhere near Turn 14.

The Emergency Response That Never Showed Up

Strip away the fire and the wreckage, and the real story here is what didn't happen.

A GT3 car was burning with a driver trapped inside, and the people paid to handle exactly that situation were nowhere on the scene.

It took a competitor, not a safety crew, to make the difference between Millroy walking away with broken bones and not walking away at all.

Team boss Betty Chen pulled her whole team out of the series over it, calling the emergency response "unacceptable" and accusing the organizers of failing the most basic job a race promoter has.

This isn't just a China problem.

NASCAR didn't even run its own traveling safety team until 2017, years after IndyCar and Formula 1 already had one, and American drivers have complained for years about slow response times on ovals back home, including a driver once left radioing for help from a wrecked truck while officials debated whether to even throw a caution flag.

Racing series on both sides of the Pacific share the same blind spot: safety crews get funded after a tragedy, not before one.

Hartog didn't wait for a caution flag, a marshal, or someone else's job to get done first.

That's the whole story – a man who had every reason to keep driving, chose not to.

Sources:

  • Motorsport.com, "Hartog hailed as hero after rescuing Millroy from fiery Shanghai crash," Motorsport.com, Sept. 2026.
  • Sportscar365, "Millroy Credits Hartog for 'Saving Life' in Massive China GT Crash," Sportscar365, Sept. 2026.
  • NBC News, "Driver thanks rival for saving his life by stopping to pull him from flaming car," NBC News, Sept. 2026.
  • PJ Media, "Race Car Driver Saves Fellow Driver From Wreck During Race," PJ Media, Sept. 7, 2026.
  • CBS Sports, "NASCAR official addresses safety team's slow response times to recent crashes," CBS Sports, 2022.
  • RaceFans.net, "'I put both my hands in the fire': Grosjean describes his 28 seconds trapped in an inferno," RaceFans.net, 2020.

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