This morning’s Autralian Grand Prix featured one of the worst crashes we’ve ever seen in Formula One and, incredibly, Fernando Alonso walked away from the wreck completely unscathed.
Alonso has admitted he’s lucky to be alive after the insane 200mph crash, which sent his McLaren flying off the track and smashing into smithereens.
According to the Daily Mail, Alonso’s right wheel clipped Esteban Gutierrez’s Haas going into turn three of the 18th lap.
The collision sent the Spaniard’s car flying into a barrier, smashing it into pieces, before it flipped, rolled and flew into another barrier at high speed.
After the crash, Alonso stepped out of his vehicle and he and Gutierrez embraced, before the two-time world champion gave a wave to the crowd to assure everyone he was okay.
After the race, Alonso said:
I’m okay, I’m trying to put everything in place again. It was a scary crash. Lucky to be here and happy to be here, and thankful to be here – especially to the [governing body] FIA and all the safety, thanks to that probably I’m alive. We lost the power unit and the car because there was a lot of damage, but I’m super happy to be talking.
We were racing, I kept in the slip-stream as late as I could and at the last moment I tried to move. It’s tough, you can only see the rear wing, you don’t have the full view of the track. And same for him, he’s defending and can’t see what the other guy is doing. So we are both happy.
I was flying, so you see the sky then the ground, then the sky, then the ground. You want to stop but it doesn’t stop. It keeps going and going and going. It was quite scary, but at the last moment the car stopped and I had a little space to go out and I said, ‘I will go out quickly because my mother will be watching at home’.
Gutierrez added: “It was a big relief to see that he was fine. It was a very scary moment and not very pleasant to see how his car ended up.” I bet!
The whole moment is utterly terrifying and we still can’t fathom how Alonso didn’t come out of this a lot worse. Fate was clearly smiling on him.
It’s an extremely vivid reminder that, for all the thrills of F1, it can also be incredibly dangerous, as these drivers perform on a knife edge at high speeds in every single race.
