Canadian Motorsports Need Injured Driver James Hinchcliffe Back on the Track

James Hinchcliffe is walking again. The pain is subsiding and he's able to do more than watch videos of the crash that nearly claimed his life. He's hoping to be back in a race car by August. He's lucky to be alive.

Canadian motorsports is lucky, too. Hinchcliffe will be at the Honda Indy Toronto this weekend, albeit in a limited role. That he was named grand marshal the same day he was given medical clearance to travel to Toronto says a lot about how important Hinchcliffe is to an event, and sport, that's been on life support for a long time.

High-speed crashes are a part of motorsports, but that doesn't make the details of Hinchcliffe's accident in May any less gruesome. The 28-year-old from Oakville, Ontario, was on track practicing for the Indianapolis 500 when his car's suspension broke and sent him into a wall. The impact itself didn't harm Hinchcliffe, but it caused the broken suspension to spear through the car and into his upper left thigh. He suffered massive blood loss and a fractured pelvis that required emergency surgery.

It's a small mercy, then, that he doesn't remember any of this.

"It's equal parts fascinating and terrifying, to be honest," he said in a teleconference Wednesday. "It was literally one of those one-in-a-million situations. The part that failed is a part that we have almost no recorded failures of ever.

"As the doctors will tell you, if that piece had been five millimeters in a different angle or a different direction, it might not have been a survivable injury. I'm the luckiest unlucky guy, or some combination therein."

It can't be overstated how important Hinchcliffe is to IndyCar and Canadian motorsports. He's humble and self-depreciating, approachable to fans, open and accommodating to media, and an easy sell to advertisers. One of the sport's sad truths is drivers spend far more time trying to find financial sponsorship than sitting in the cockpit of a car. In this regard, Hinchcliffe has succeeded where other accomplished Canadian drivers such as Alex Tagliani struggled.

Hinchcliffe broke into IndyCar in 2011 as Tagliani and Paul Tracy were each entering the twilight of their careers. A year later, wearing a pair of gloves late-Canadian driver Greg Moore gave him as a boy, Hinchcliffe made a splash with a second-place qualifying result at the Indy 500. He then won three times in 2013, including a stunning overtake of Takuma Sato on the final lap in Brazil that remains one of IndyCar's great highlights of the decade.

Hinchcliffe's rise, however, has not lifted the sport's Canadian profile. If anything, it's kept it from disappearing altogether.

The Toronto race has slowly started to regain its audience since being forced to take a year off in 2008 due to the unification of Champ Car and Indy Racing League into what's now known as IndyCar. It immediately suffered in 2009, though, and last year's event had been scheduled to include two races, but torrential rain on the opening day postponed the first race and turned the weekend into a PR disaster.

It hasn't helped that Canadians, including Hinchcliffe, have performed poorly in Toronto. Tracy remains the only Canadian to win the event, which he did twice in 1993 and 2003. Hinchcliffe, meanwhile, has yet to place better than eighth.

IndyCar officials have teased at adding other Canadian events, but there's little reason to. Vancouver hasn't held a race since 2004 when lack of sponsorship and Olympic development moved the event to Edmonton, Alberta, where it fared even worse.

Race fans will point to Formula One's Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal as an argument for the sport's popularity. In the past, the three-day event has drawn roughly 300,000 people and has an estimated economic impact of $90 million. Renovations are set to begin at Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in 2017 and the race is guaranteed to stay put until 2024.

Despite all this, F1's reach in Canada is extremely limited and its struggle to find a North American audience is well documented. It doesn't help that this year's race was less entertaining than rush-hour traffic. There's no Canadian driver, and hasn't been one worth discussing since Jacques Villeneuve won the world championship in 1997.

NASCAR, meanwhile, holds no Sprint Cup races in Canada. It promotes a smaller, 11-race schedule with four races in Ontario, four in Quebec, one in Alberta, one in Saskatchewan and another in Nova Scotia. The junior series involves none of stock car's star drivers and Canadian Tire has said it will withdraw its title sponsorship after this season.

All of this just underlines how much the sport relies on Hinchcliffe. He's currently working to find corporate sponsorship for a possible 2017 IndyCar race in Calgary, Alberta, which would give the sport a much-needed presence in Western Canada, and has spoken in the past of creating a carting series for young Canadian drivers.

In an ideal scenario, high-profile races are held across the country involving more than just one Canadian driver. For a sport just trying to survive, however, getting Hinchcliffe back on the track for even one race is paramount.