After Toro Rosso’s Max Verstappen had himself a good scare in Monaco a few weeks ago, this time it was Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen who was really lucky to walk away from what looks like a pretty bad crash.
On the exit of Turn 2 in Austria, Raikkonen suddenly found himself losing control of the car and next thing he knew, Alonso’s redesigned McLaren-Honda was right on top of him!
At first (just like everybody else) we thought that Alonso somehow hit Raikkonen, causing him to lose control and colliding with his McLaren. In reality, and in Fernando’s words, “He existed T2 with a lot of wheelspin – I went to overtake him and he lost the car to the left, and that’s exactly where I was – so we both went into the wall. Luckily, we’re both fine. It was a strange incident, because he lost the car in fifth gear, so it must have been very low grip.”
Yeah, strange is an understatement. Kimi was quoted as saying that he didn’t know exactly what had happened and that he was “at quite high speed, suddenly went left and ended up there. I did not see anything coming, everything happened very quickly.”
That’s exactly what we see in the video too. You really wouldn’t expect your car to lose grip in such a scenario..and on a dry track. Still, it did lose grip and Alonso’s McLaren did come flying out of nowhere over the Ferrari – good thing we’ve got two camera angles. The cockpit cam shows us just how sudden everything was and how close Kimi came to being actually hit by the McLaren. If that car would have flown straight into his helmet and not few cm in front, it would have been really bad.
The 2nd video shows us the crash from a different angle, which is interesting too. We get to see how Alonso’s car was basically a sitting duck once Raikkonen lost control of his Ferrari.
Scary stuff!