No worries for Hartley returning to track after crash

Toro Rosso's Brendon Hartley was involved in one of the scariest-looking accidents of the season so far when he and Williams' Lance Stroll collided at the start of the Canadian Grand Prix.

"I had a decent start - not perfect, could have been better - and had an awesome run out of turn 4," he said in a video blog for the official Formula 1 website.

"I was squeezed a little bit on the left but I felt like the move [on Stroll] was on," he continued. "It was side-by-side coming into turn 5.

"I'm not sure if Lance had a puncture, it sure looked like it to me," he mused. "But he lost the ground of his car and came into me, which in turn put me pretty heavily in the wall and that was the end of my race."

"Another race, another crash," he sighed. "I'm getting really sick of telling you all what could have been. But yeah, my race ended before it started really.

"Unfortunately I wasn't able to reward the team for the great job they'd done all weekend, including Honda who had brought an update.

"[It would have been good] to bring home a good haul of points, I think we really deserved that. But sometimes that's racing."

Hartley was taken to the medical centre and from there he was airlifted to a local Montreal hospital, raising concerns at the time that he had suffered serious injuries.

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But the Kiwi insisted that this wasn't the case and he had never been worried about his health.

"I was all okay, probably didn't need a trip to the hospital," he insisted.

"But we have sensors in our earpieces which tell us how many Gs we pull. The same as in the car, which measure how many Gs the car is put through which is effectively how much force is being put on my head.

"It was high enough to warrant a trip to the hospital," he shrugged.

With a clean bill of health, the 28-year-old can now look forward to the next race - the first French Grand Prix in a decade, and the first at Le Castellet since Alain Prost won for Ferrari in 1990.

"Paul Ricard is a circuit I know well, although not in a Formula 1 car," said Hartley. "We did a lot of testing there with WEC in the LMP1 car and I won the LMP2 category in 2013.

"It was always a popular track for endurance testing and I'm also pretty handy round there in the night-time, although that's not going to come into play in a Formula 1 car!

"I understand the track has been completely resurfaced, which will be interesting to see, because it was quite a unique track in terms of tyre life.

"It's a track I enjoy driving and it's still pretty quick," he said. "Though not as fast as the configuration I used to test on, which didn't have the chicane on the back straight.

"Even so, I think it's a cool track.

"It's obviously got a lot of history, both for sports cars and Formula 1, so I'm really looking forward to it."

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