Winter is coming and, at eight in the morning, Amsterdam is dark as Loek Hartog and I walk towards the park. The GT motor racing driver is only 24 but, after all he did last month, when he showed extraordinary courage in saving the life of his fellow racer Ollie Millroy, we talk easily about life and death.

Hartog sips a takeaway coffee and, as we stroll, he asks if the world seems to be in a worse state than usual. Paris is burning, Kyiv is reeling, Vladimir Putin is being hailed as “a humanitarian” by Donald Trump’s envoy and the robots are coming for us. These are grim times, but I remind Hartog that he gave us hope as, after ripping off the doors of Millroy’s burning car as if he had stepped out of a superhero movie, his humanity was remarkably moving. Hartog dragged Millroy to safety before trying to comfort the 36-year-old Briton after an accident that left him with six broken ribs, a damaged lung, a splintered collarbone, a broken hand, a fractured C6 neck vertebrae and a stunned sense that he had almost died at the China GT.

We sit near a small lake and Hartog explains he will soon fly to Shanghai again for the next round of racing in the GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup. This weekend he is back on the same track where he and Millroy shared something profound, and driving the same kind of car that almost killed his new friend.

A low sun rises over Vondelpark, the birds are singing and cyclists whir past in an unbroken hum as the young Dutch driver resists being called heroic. “Maybe the biggest thing to process was that a lot of people actually had the balls to tell me: ‘Oh, I would have never done the same,’” he says. “That made me more emotional than the actual circumstances and this is why I’m sitting here. We need to do better as a society. We need to stand up for each other. You already touched on this, with what we see in the news. We’re all humans and we need each other. Why be against each other?”

Has the accident changed Hartog? “Of course. I look at things with a completely different angle now. But it’s like an additional angle. It’s not that I’ve changed my character. I’m still the same guy with just one experience more.”

He adds: “The biggest thing I’m conscious of now is not every time somebody calls this a heroic act, which is a very nice appraisal. It’s when people say: ‘I wouldn’t have acted the same.’ I’d love to trust people. I know you can’t expect these things but the world would be a better place if we can. I came away from it unscathed and, as humans, it’s not that hard. Really, I’m no special guy. We can all do this.”

It’s worth recounting what “this” amounted to for Hartog. He was driving at “around 270km/h” down a straight when he saw fire engulf Millroy’s Ferrari after he had been hit by a car involved in a different collision. “I saw a lot of flames,” Hartog remembers. “I’m quite tall, 6ft 6in, but I think the flames were twice my height. So I knew there was a high chance of him not getting out himself. It was quite serious.”

Did he feel afraid? “It’s kind of similar to stepping on a surfboard for the first time. You don’t know what you’re doing. It was more that kind of feeling – not really scared. For me there was no other scenario than I would get him out.”

Hartog didn’t consider the danger that Millroy’s car might explode. “No, you don’t think of that. It was like the movies because it felt like slow motion. When I watched it back for the first time I was like: ‘That was it?’ It felt so much longer.”

He tried to open the driver’s door before running round to the other side of the car. Hartog yanked the doors off but says, with a smile: “It looks a lot more spectacular [than it was].”

When a marshal finally arrived, Hartog took the fire extinguisher from the man, who was not wearing flame-proof clothing. He doused the worst of the fire before, after two attempts, pulling Millroy out of the burning wreck. It took just over a minute and Hartog says: “Ollie was confused and not aware he was in a car in flames. It was like he was knocked out in a boxing match and not able to breathe. He kept repeating: ‘Where am I? What happened? I think I broke my back.’ The help was not the best because not many people were speaking English. So they kept moving him and I kept telling everyone [to stop]. That was maybe the worst thing for me because I felt the most helpless.”

Hartog and Millroy sat near a barrier as they waited for the medics. “That’s where we became a bit more emotional because I was telling him: ‘You’re going to be OK. There’s help on the way.’ I was making eye contact, but he was in shock.”

After Millroy was taken away, Hartog drove his car slowly back to the pits. “I was like: ‘I need to stop [racing].’ You think like that in those moments which is human and natural. But then you think of all that [racing] means to you. So [his doubts] very quickly turned into: ‘When can I go out back again?’ It’s like a drug, racing.”

Hartog visited Millroy in hospital that night. “He was very drugged, but I showed him on my phone what happened and he kept saying: ‘Oh my God, nobody told me it was this bad. Oh my God, is that me?’ He realised it would have been very different if I wasn’t there.”

It felt as if fate had intervened because, as Hartog says: “I was doing very bad in the race and, usually, I’m not running so far at the back. But that actually put me in the position to respond the way I did. So it’s such a strange turn of events that led to this. It’s unbelievable.”

Before the race on 5 September he had “a very bad feeling. I reflected more on myself, like something would be wrong for me. In the end, it turned out differently.”

Millroy has a wife, Fern, and three children. That night, everything they could have lost hit Hartog. “That was really emotional for me,” he says. “I couldn’t sleep because I was overloaded and then Wiep, my partner, sent me a picture of Fern, the kids and Ollie at Disneyland. She was like: ‘You did it for them.’ That really struck me.”

The deep gratitude felt by Ollie and Fern meant they flew to Amsterdam to surprise him this month. “My birthday is 5 October,” Hartog says, “and I thought I was going for lunch with Wiep. She said: ‘Oh, we need to get a big frame for my masters’ degree before lunch.’ I was like: ‘Why can’t we get it after lunch?’ She was saying: ‘We need to get it now.’ I was like: ‘OK, OK.’ Then we walked into this restaurant [near the framers] and I asked for a table for two. We were taken to one where Ollie and Fern were sitting.”

Hartog’s shock gave way to delight and then appreciation. “It was really special and they gave me a very special gift. They gave me a watch, because I gave them more time.”

That simple gesture is laced with deeper resonance and Hartog asks if I would like to see it. He spreads the Rolex across his open hand, and we think how time would have stopped for the Millroy family had he not saved Ollie’s life.

Did he and Millroy know each other before the accident? “No. We’d heard of each other but we’re from different generations. Ollie has been a benchmark and a competitor to some of my mentors.”

Despite their difference in age, Hartog and Millroy are determined to work together. “Absolutely. That’s the most important thing – that something positive comes out of this. If the headline had been ‘British racing driver had a fatal accident’ rather than ‘was saved’, it would have been a completely bad story for our sport. We don’t want that to happen, ever.”

It took 47 seconds for a marshal to appear and more than four minutes for medical assistance to arrive at the Shanghai track. We discuss the anger of Betty Chen, Millroy’s teammate at Ferrari, who wrote: “The measures taken by the organisers following today’s incident, particularly the lack of an immediate and adequate emergency response, are something we cannot accept. The safety of drivers and team members must always come before anything else. What happened today and the way the situation was handled is truly unacceptable.”

Hartog understands Chen’s anger. “Absolutely. First of all, an incident like this should never happen. And, secondly, there should be no driver that needs to stop to help in a case like this.”

He continues: “Lots of people told me the marshals are not allowed to cross the guardrails on their own, which makes total sense on paper. But once something like this happens in front of you, I cannot believe you’re telling people to go against their feeling. If your gut tells you to do something, it should be your cue to act. We should mandate rules that are more human.”

There is something deeply human in Hartog as, walking back to his apartment, he talks about his hope that he and Millroy may race each other again next year. But we sense the difficulties Millroy faces when we have a WhatsApp video call with him. The injured racer talks openly about how he is struggling since he took himself off his strong painkillers. He compares it to the withdrawal symptoms a heroin addict might suffer, while the pain has become excruciating.

We postpone our joint interview until the next morning. Hartog and I are convinced that Millroy won’t be well enough to talk and we agree to leave him in peace during his long and painful recovery. But 24 hours later Millroy messages me to say he is ready to chat on a Zoom call from Dubai.

“I was hoping to be in better shape six weeks on, but I’m really struggling,” Millroy says. “I’m in a lot of pain. It’s really hard and I’m getting frustrated. The meds gave me a false sense of security because the team are testing at Sebring [in Florida] in four weeks and I’d thought I might be all right for that. But since I’ve come off the painkillers, I can’t even imagine getting anywhere near a racing car. I can’t even get in a road car at the moment, it’s that sore. I’ve got an appointment this afternoon to work out a plan but it’s made me realise I’m a lot further away than I thought.”

Hartog leans towards his friend on screen and says: “It’s pretty insane what your body has been trying to heal the last six weeks.”

Millroy nods. “I guess this is one thing I can’t rush, I can’t force, I can’t influence, other than doing what I’m doing, which is eating the right things and trying to rest. But I’m in so much pain I can’t even sleep. It’s just in my head that I want to move on. It’s in our nature, right? I guess it’s why we do what we do. We’re not the most patient.

“It’s a really weird feeling because I’m also enjoying time at home with my wife and kids. So am I desperate to switch back to all the travel? I don’t think so. The bit I love about motorsport is driving a racing car and that’s not been impacted at all by what’s happened. I’m excited to get back behind the wheel and compete. But I don’t feel like my life’s been put on hold because I’m not at a circuit next weekend.”

The two friends talk engagingly about the addiction of racing and it’s striking that Millroy’s son, Mylo, has already fallen for karting. “It was pretty crazy,” Millroy says. “We were still in hospital when he had his first race. My wife flew out a couple of hours after the accident. She was watching it live on TV at home [in Dubai] and got the first flight to China. She told the kids I had food poisoning and she needed to come to China to help me get home. But news of the accident spread around the school and, even though they’re just eight years old, kids were seeing it on YouTube and parents were talking about it.

“On the Wednesday after the accident Mylo called us in tears because he’d seen it. He’d watched enough racing to know that that doesn’t happen very often. He said: ‘I want to be with you.’ We said: ‘The best thing you can do is have a great weekend and just enjoy everything on the track.’ And he did. Even at his age you can see the addiction and passion for racing.”

Mylo finished third and was awarded the top novice prize at the UAE International. “He’s off to a great start,” his dad says. “But the most important thing is that he’s enjoying it.”

Hartog had told me the previous day about his own start in motorsport that had been fuelled by his father’s love of GT racing. “The best thing is the time you get to spend with your parents or with your dad,” he says before talking directly to Millroy. “Ollie, you and Mylo will spend a lot of time together in the winter. That’s great.”

The drivers are determined to bring about change in racing. “We want to try to save more lives by pushing for better safety,” Millroy says of their joint objective. “Safety has improved so much in the last few decades. But we’ve got to a stage everybody has sat back and said: ‘Motorsport can’t get any safer than it is now.’ But my accident proved it can, especially in some parts of the world. It’s been a wake-up call for a lot of organisers, a lot of circuits. We’d like to get the whole motorsport community together to make sure steps are taken to make the sport safer – because it’s very clear there are still areas in need of improvement.”

This weekend Millroy will turn on his TV and watch Hartog race in Shanghai while remembering his traumatic accident. He says: “I’m not particularly angry about anything that happened. All the positivity since then massively overwhelms any anger.”

He amuses us as he recalls the look on Hartog’s face when he and Fern were surprise guests at his birthday: “It was pure shock as he had absolutely no idea. It was brilliant.”

I know how often Millroy has thanked Hartog but is there anything else he would like to say to the man who saved him? “Thank you again Loek and don’t change. I know you won’t. This is in your nature and you’re an inspiration to all of us in sport and life in general. Fern and I now think about life differently because you really put everything into perspective. So thank you for myself and also on behalf of so many millions of people that have seen this story. You’ve been really inspirational.”

Hartog’s face fills the screen and he says: “Thank you, Ollie. I’m really looking forward to the friendship that comes out of this, talking about Mylo’s career and the fun stuff which keeps us busy every day. In the three times we’ve met each other in person it has been very special and always too short. I look forward to it being normal and to seeing Ollie being fully himself again and smiling a big and really complete smile. That would be special.”