BREAKING NEWS: Mark Webber has crashed out of the European Grand Prix at Valencia after a spectacular incident with the Lotus of Heikki Kovalainen. The contact with Kovalainen happened on lap 9 of the 57 lap race. Importantly, both drivers walked away with no injuries and have been released from the trackside medical centre.
After a poor start from second on the grid Webber had dropped back to ninth place by the second lap. Webber’s Red Bull team brought him in for an early pit stop in a bid to escape traffic; the Valencia track is notoriously difficult to pass.
Webber’s bad day continued with a less than perfect pit stop after the crew had problems changing his front left wheel. However, things were about to get much worse. After rejoining the race Webber found himself fighting with Kovalainen for track position. The Finn swerved to defend his place and the rapidly closing Webber was left with nowhere to go except up. And up, and up!
Webber’s car flipped and landed on its roof before crashing into a tyre barrier at high speed. It was an incident reminiscent of Webber’s crash during practice at Le Mans in 1999.
After the break you can see a series of screen grabs of the incident, including the view from Mark’s in-car camera. There’s an animation showing the incident, as well as footage from Webber’s Le Mans crash.
UPDATE: Webber’s teammate Sebastien Vettel won the race ahead of the McLaren duo of Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button. A full race image gallery will be online in the next 24 hours.
[Pics via OneHD]
9 replies on “Mark Webber’s spectacular crash at the European GP”
Shocking crash for Mark, really bad luck.
Also shows that the slower “back marker” teams should just get the f*ck out of the way of a faster car.
The only upside to this incident is that Mark Webber has now qualified for the next round of the Red Bull Air Race.
Haha.
Also shows just how strong the safety cells of modern F1 cars are now.
Fark… the last thing I expected in that sequence was to see mark getting out of the car under his own steam!
Amazing how the front still managed to absorb some of the impact after the nose cone smashed appart when he hit Heikki.
As per http://feed.motorcentral.com/f1-mark-webbers-spectacular-crash I think Heikki moved twice and right at the end when he started to go back left, he hesitated and stopped moving when you’d expect the driver to then take the racing line.
Man, whoever capped those stills could have deinterlaced them first.
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