Former Formula 1 driver Mika Salo has spoken out after he was stabbed while on holiday. The Finnish former racer was left with “a really big open wound” which doctors suspected was caused by a knife, after he was suddenly attacked by a moped rider in the Thai capital.
The unsuspecting Salo said he was simply walking across a pedestrian crossing on Tuesday when a moped rider passed close by. He said he “felt a little hit” but did not realise anything was seriously wrong until a stranger tolf him he was bleeding from his leg. “I looked down and saw that my shoe was completely covered in blood,” he told Finnish newspaper IS.
He tried to clean the wound himself but realised quickly that it was a large gash on his calf and a nearby taxi driver took him to hospital. Salo explained: “The doctor looked at it and said it was really sharp. He suspected a knife. Of course, it’s not certain, but the wound was so clean and straight.”
While it was a random attack, hospital workers also told him that a handful of other patients had been injured in a similar way that evening as the moped rider had apparently gone on “a stabbing rampage”. He added: “They told me that there had been several similar cuts that evening and night.”
Fortunately Salo, who started 109 F1 races in the 1990s and early 2000s, including a brief stint driving for Ferrari as their chosen replacement for Michael Schumacher when the German suffered a season-ending broken leg in 1999, said he has managed to keep his wound free of infection up to now. It has limited his holiday activities, however, particularly as he is under instruction not to let the cut get wet – ruling out any swimming or strenuous activity which might make him sweat.
Salo said: “It’s a shame. You can’t swim or really do anything. You spend quite a lot of time in the hotel room. The wound will stay dry in an air-conditioned room. The doctor said not to walk long distances now, but I can easily walk a kilometer or two. I don’t have any pain and I haven’t taken any painkillers. I’m just on a course of antibiotics.”
He insists he does not fear the many moped riders in the city despite his ordeal, adding: “There’s always room for idiots in a big city. Luckily, this one hit his leg and not anything else. They were just trying to cause damage, if this was intentional. If they had wanted to do more damage, of course they would have tried to hit someone’s upper body. Then maybe I wouldn’t say much here.”
Salo is not the only former F1 star who has been attacked in recent days – Swiss newspaper Blick reports that four-time world champion Alain Prost suffered minor injuries during a break-in at his family home in Nyon, on the shore of Lake Geneva. The masked men who broke in are said to have threatened his family until one of Prost’s sons opened a safe and are still at large, with investigators worried they may have crossed the border into the south of France.