CONDO 750 2012

[GregMember]

Been following Ben Grabhams progress since the accident and I found this today

Thanks to motoonline

Ben Grabham had been airlifted to hospital after a top gear crash during the Cond 750, at Conobolin, NSW.

Having placed second on Saturday?s leg of the race to local favourite and log-time Aus Safari rival Todd Smith, Grabbo was on the hunt for the win in Sunday?s leg of the race.

In one of the bigger stages of Sunday’s leg, Grabbo eventually passed Todd while he was refuelling at a splash and dash and charged on as the lead rider.

About 50km later, Todd glanced to see Grabbo’s bike in a heap off the side of the track while he was pinned in top gear himself. He turned back to look for Ben and found him laying motionless some 50-meters ahead of where his bike had stopped.

Todd slowly woke Ben and helped coax him back to conciousness. When Ben woke, he was able to stand up but had a broken shoulder, a bone poking through his forearm and severe back pain.
By this stage Ben’s brother Damian had come through the field and stayed to look after Ben, allowing Todd to continue on along with other competitors who were being waved by.

With Ben stabilized and awaiting medical assistance, Damian walked back towards the start of where the crash occured and found a dead kangaroo only metres before the first marks the bike had left in the ground.

Given the section of track was smooth and extremely fast, Damian assessed that the Kangaroo jumped into the side of Ben’s KTM 500EXC and pitched it into an instant highside while he was doing approx 160-170kph.

It took some three hours before a 4WD ambulance could get to Ben and transfer him to a area clear enough for a flying doctor to airlift him to hospital. CT scans later revealed that Ben had also crushed three vertabrae in his spine and was immediately transfered to a spinal unit near Sydney.

I am sure anyone that has met Ben knows what a down to earth guy he is on and off the track. I an sure we all wish him a speedy and full recovery

TB

[StuartMember]

More info in this news article.

Shame it is all focused on Ben, three other riders were taken from the event in a bad way & nothing is mentioned anywhere.

Bathurst rider Ben Grabham was seriously injured after hitting a kangaroo at 150 kilometres an hour during a stage of the Condo 750 on Sunday and is waiting on CT scans on his back to know the extent of his injuries.
The Motorex KTM rider was leading the race when he came across six kangaroos who jumped out from behind scrub on a high speed straight section of road. He slammed into one, knocking him off his bike and leaving him with a broken wrist and shoulder plus back problems.

Damien Grabham was five minutes behind his brother and stayed with him while waiting on assistance. He didn’t take any further part in the race.

“He is at Westmead Hospital and is still waiting on CT scans on his back. He has broken his wrist and shoulder and has cuts and bruises, but the main problem is his back,” Damien said.

“He can still move his feet and legs but until the results of the CT scan come, it’s hard to say what damage has been done. It certainly looks like he will be out for a while at this stage.

“Ben was winning the race, he had passed the leader earlier in the day and I was running fourth. As soon as I got there [to Ben] I just stopped. I didn’t care about the race after that.”

Ben had elected not to the do the Australian Off-Road Championship this year, instead preferring to concentrate on doing 10 desert events. He won the QUIT Forest Rally in Western Australia a week ago, his first major race for the season, and he was looking strong to get another win on Sunday.

He finished fourth in Friday’s prologue with Damien seventh.

Ben had worked his way up to second by the end of Saturday, just one minute and 44 seconds behind Todd Smith, with his brother remaining in seventh.

Both moved up the leaderboard on Sunday morning, but Smith regained the lead and and went on to win after Ben’s accident.

Damien said there wasn’t anything Ben could do to avoid the collision and added it was one of those races where there were a few obstacles for the competitors to overcome.

“I had three cows come out in front of me about half an hour before [Ben’s accident], so you just don’t know what can happen,” he said.

“It was that dusty at times too so that you couldn’t see what was going on. There were about six bikes ahead of me at the start of the race and the dust was just hanging around, there wasn’t any breeze to break it up.

“There was a straight that was three or four kilometres long and I was only going 40 kilometres an hour when I should have been doing 150, but there just wasn’t any visibility.”

The youngest of the Grabham brothers, Broc, also competed in the race and he came home 15th despite having plenty of problems himself.

“He did okay, he had a fair few dramas,” Damien said.

“He stayed with a rider who had come off his bike on the first day and then he had a tyre come off a rim and he had to ride for 50 kilometres before he could put a new one on.

“He also stopped with Ben, but I told him to keep going to stop him from getting too upset.”

There was better news for the Bathurst father-son combination of David and Andrew Travis, who finished second in the Auto section in their Isuzu Vcross. It was just the second time that the pair had contested the event after finishing fourth in 2011.

They had a two and a half minute lead after Saturday but lost time on Sunday and finished less than a minute behind winners Geoff Olholm and Gordon Trigg.

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