The Wear Your Helmet to Work Day challenge is an annual event presented by Grassroots Motorsports magazine and Stilo Racing. The contest encourages racers from also various motorsport disciplines to put their racing passions on public display by sending in a photo of themselves wearing their helmets at their day job.

Of course this naturally leads to a lot of light-hearted images of helmeted folks in the break room, out on a worksite, or at their desk in the office. This year, however, the image sent in by Mark Petronis of AMT Motorsport – a Corvette tuning and parts manufacturing outfit based in Clifton Park, New York – immediately stood out from the rest.

A longtime high performance driving event (HPDE) enthusiast, Petronis made the jump to wheel-to-wheel competition back in 2015 when he started campaigning a C5 Corvette Z06 in NASA’s ST2 class. “Like a lot of kids born in the '80s, it all started for me with The Fast and the Furious, of course,” he says with a laugh. “It’s silly, but that sort of planted the seed of getting interested in performance driving for me. The next year, my dad bought a C5 Corvette and we took that to Watkins Glen for a track day, and he actually let me, his crazy teenaged son, drive it. That was a game-changer.”

Petronis has seen a lot of success in the ST2 class over the past few seasons and has been steadily upgrading his equipment in turn. “I’ve had a few middle-of-the-road helmets over the years, but I decided to kind of treat myself when I got my Stilo ST5 back in 2019,” he says. “And the first time I put it on, it was immediately obvious just how much better everything about it was in comparison to my old helmets. And today, I attribute a lot of why I still have a face to that helmet.”

On May 23rd, Petronis was running up front in a mixed-class race at New Jersey Motorsports Park when the unthinkable happened. “I was coming up on two out-of-class cars,” he recalls. “One of them was all the way to the left side of the track, and the other all the way to the right, so the space that was created was straight up the middle. Normally I would have waited to pass, but the guy on the right gave me a point-by, so I knew that he saw me and that we’d give each other room. So I gave the guy on the left extra space and went for it. But for the guy on the right, it turned out to be his first time at that track, and I don’t think he was fully aware that the course kind of pinches in right there – and I should have been cognizant of that, too. It’s just one of those racing incidents where a few more inches would have made the difference.”

Petronis completed the pass, but as they came through the corner, the other driver ended up making contact with Petronis’s rear quarter panel, spinning the car off the track at roughly 115 miles per hour. “The car ended up hitting a tree, which is why the crash was as bad as it was,” he says. “I actually recovered the data from my car, and I by the time I made contact with the tree, the car had slowed down to about 70 mph. The bigger problem was that I hit it with the right rear wheel, which is right where the fuel tanks are in a Corvette.”

The car immediately burst into flames, and to make matters worse, Petronis was knocked unconscious by the impact. Three minutes went by before first responders could extract him from the car as they fought through the flames, and he sustained second and third-degree burns to roughly a third of his body. “My face looked like Freddy Krueger for a couple weeks, but those burns have healed since,” he tells us. “They recovered my helmet from the accident, and you can see exactly where the fire was in the car from the way it’s damaged. That helmet actually sits in a glass case in my office now – it reminds me of how lucky I was. It’s an impactful piece. So when this GRM challenge was coming up, I decided to pull it out of the case and put that smoky, stinky thing back on my head and go into the shop to work on some control arms. It was about getting the message out that this stuff matters, and people should take their safety seriously.”

Petronis’s contest-winning photo: “I wanted the message to be as impactful as possible,” he says. “I think it’s important that people be aware that there are some dangers involved and they should take their safety seriously. And of course I wanted to win this thing. At this point I’m ready to have Stilo branded on my forehead because I believe in the product so much.”

Not surprisingly, Petronis’s entry won the contest by a wide margin. And the prize? A new Stilo helmet. “These auto racing helmets are designed with a fire-proof interior,” explains Stilo’s Charlie James. “It’s part of the requirements for Snell and FIA certification in order for helmets like these to be eligible for use in auto racing. These testing standards are very fire-conscious – the materials used in these helmets are intentionally designed that way to provide fire protection in case of an incident like this. Mark has a long recovery road in front of him, but he was extremely lucky when you consider the amount of fire that was exposed to. And to that end, we always push people to also wear balaclavas to add an additional layer or two of Nomex over the face – whether that’s required by the event organizers or not.”

Snell recently finalized their SA2020 certification, and as such, older helmets that are rated SA2010 will soon be ineligible for use in competition.

“As the technology, materials, and design of helmets continues to evolve, Snell introduces a new, more stringent standard every five years,” James says. “Crash data is always giving us more information about where helmet design can be improved. In the case of the SA2020, it brings the standard much closer in line with the FIA 8859 helmets used over in Europe. A big part of the focus with this new standard is on secondary impacts – not only does the helmet need to withstand the first impact, but in many cases you also have a secondary impact that requires significant protection as well. So here they’ve increased the impact velocity of the testing “ball” that hits the helmet by five to ten percent on that second impact testing, and they’ve also reduced the peak G threshold that your head can be subjected to when it decelerates in an impact. So what we’re trying to do here is decrease the forces that are impacting on the head.” Helmets like the Stilo ST5 and the Simpson Diamondback will go a long way towards protecting the driver should the things go wrong out on the track.

Petronis says that his first inclination after leaving the hospital was to get back into a race car as soon as possible, but he soon realized that wheel-to-wheel competition might not be in the cards for a little while. “Eventually I had to come to terms with what’s required for my recovery, and I have my family to think about as well. In the meantime we’ve got a C8 on order and we’re going to start developing components for that platform through AMT Motorsport, so there will be plenty of track days coming up. But I also want to put on some safety seminars. People need to be aware that while it is rare, this can happen, and you shouldn’t be out there in a t-shirt, jeans, and a hundred-dollar helmet.”