By Kieran Jackson

Copyright independent

Sitting behind the welcome desk of a luggage storage facility in Galway, waiting for the next customer, is perhaps not where Adam Fitzgerald envisaged life would take him not so long ago. In the summer of 2023, the Irishman – then a teenager, now 21 – was racing at some of motorsport’s most famous European circuits alongside a host of young talents, which included Italian prodigy Kimi Antonelli, now a Mercedes driver in Formula 1.

Antonelli’s ascent to the highest echelon of single-seater motorsport was one that hundreds of teenagers dream about. Fitzgerald, a late bloomer having started karting at 16, was no different, despite how grandiose the goal may have seemed. But then came the crash.

“I’m super grateful for my mental health in that period,” Fitzgerald says, recalling that awfully difficult time in his life two years ago. “I just moved past that day and put the blockers on.

“I didn’t look back.”

The day in question was 1 July 2023. Fitzgerald, racing for Irish junior team RPM Motorsport, was involved in a horror incident on the Kemmel Straight at Spa-Francorchamps in a Formula Regional European Championship (FRECA) race. In heavy rain, with visibility next to nothing, a multi-car chain reaction resulted in Fitzgerald colliding with Dutch driver Dilano van ‘t Hoff, who tragically lost his life at the age of 18.

“We definitely shouldn’t have been racing,” Fitzgerald tells me of that day, bringing into focus the recent decision to delay the start of this year’s Belgian Grand Prix in wet conditions. On that day, it was caution over jeopardy but regrettably, it wasn’t in 2023.

“There are levels of rain, but we simply couldn’t even see. I was trying to open my visor just to see. Eau Rouge was completely blind and the conditions were awful. It was a really bad decision from the organisers and it was obviously all just so unfortunate.”

F1 drivers Max Verstappen and Lance Stroll were among those who raised concerns about the race, particularly given the section of Spa circuit where the incident occurred. It brought back tragic memories of Anthoine Hubert’s fatal crash in 2019, just before the Kemmel Straight at Raidillon.

“Personally, I’m really surprised it didn’t affect me in the way most people would imagine,” Fitzgerald admits. “That could very easily have f***** most people up.”

Fitzgerald, just 19 at the time, suffered four broken vertebrae in his lower back and a broken elbow. A few months later, he returned to training and eyed a new racing journey in the United States, in a feeder series to IndyCar. But quickly, it became apparent that his back would become a persistent issue of debilitation.

Less than a year later, the constant pain and painkillers all became too much: it was time to call it a day. In hindsight, his eagerness to return to the cockpit would not be so overwhelming, given his experience.

“If the same thing happened now, I would just call it quits straight away,” he says, in his first interview since hanging up the helmet last May. “There’s more to life than racing. Yeah, a perspective shift… that’s what it is.

“I never thought about stopping, it was all about ‘when can I get back?’ F1 was always the goal but then it shifted to IndyCar. But now, my back is screwed. For the first year, I couldn’t sit down on a chair and now, I don’t go 10 minutes without chronic pain. It was just impossible for me to compete at a high level.

“I was so happy with my decision to quit, it’s the best decision I’ve ever made. It was such a weight off my shoulders.”

Perhaps it was his late calling to racing which made the transition to normal life more palatable. Fitzgerald, in his early teens, had ambitions to become a professional rugby player, getting as far as trials for provincial team Connacht at openside flanker. It was only a chance encounter with a friend which persuaded his father to take him to Athboy Karting Centre in County Meath, where compatriot Alex Dunne’s motorsport journey also started.

Fitzgerald loved it. In the space of three years, with the Covid pandemic sandwiched in the middle, the Galway native progressed from karting – where he “struggled a lot” – to British F4 and then FRECA, the last step before F3 and beyond. Prior to his debut season, he even appeared on Ireland’s famous RTE talk programme The Late Late Show.

Fitzgerald is full of praise for FRECA, which produces, as he sees it, “F1’s stars of the future.” But it’s not all a blissful state of existence.

“Racing seems so glamorous and whatnot and it can be… but it’s very different to team sports where you’ve got two sides,” he says. “There’s only one winner out of however many drivers. It’s a lot of money, a lot of financial investment [a FRECA seat costs in the region of £600,000 in funding] and a lot of effort and travel.

“It’s months of discipline, all for a few seconds where you may have a technical issue or a crash. And then the people backing you might have to wait another few months to see a result. Mentally, it’s very tough.”

But now, there’s no looking back. Fitzgerald is building his profile in his other passion aside from racing, the world of business. Earlier this year, he was named in a “30 under 30” Business Post list of Ireland’s next generation of tech innovators. He has launched a platform called Toon, where music promoters can build their brand online and sell their own tickets. He describes it as the “Shopify for event promoters”, which now has 600 sign-ups across Ireland, the UK and the US.

As for the Galway luggage facility that he fully launched in March and currently now occupies? All to fully fund Toon’s growth in the years to come.

And so beyond past aspirations of F1, Fitzgerald is now wholly content with the direction he has taken. And all of it with the freshest and maturest of outlooks, which is highly commendable given the life-changing crash two years ago.

“I have no frustration about my career in the slightest,” he sums up. “Zero regrets. I’m just so grateful now that I have way more perspective on life because of what I went through.

“When you go through hard s*** like that, everything else in life is so minor. You have things that p*** you off, sure… but they’re all meaningless compared to that.”