Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMcLaren

McLaren asks FIA to investigate crash

Ron Dennis says he approached the FIA to ask it to look in to the circumstances surrounding the Fernando Alonso crash during testing.

Alonso crashed at the Circuit de Catalunya, hitting the wall on the inside of the track between turns 3 and 4 and having to be airlifted to hospital. While saying that Alonso is uninjured - with not even a mild concussion being picked up on hospital scans - Dennis says he spoke to FIA safety delegate Charlie Whiting about analysing the incident which left Alonso hospitalised for three days.

“I personally contacted the FIA - through Charlie - on Monday and suggested that we review the situation,” Dennis said. “So the involvement of the FIA is by ourselves.

“The FIA are very interesting in looking at the helmet position in relation to the structures. We want to share everything to satisfy the FIA, we’re being thorough.”

And Dennis says there is nothing obvious in McLaren’s data to suggest a cause for the accident other than the strong winds it has previously highlighted, adding that there is poor footage from circuit cameras.

“What we can’t see is anything illogical. He brakes in to the corner, he changes gear down through the corners and then the accident starts to happen. We can’t forensically determine what happened other than nothing broke, there was nothing abnormal that we could see on the system.

“If there had been good footage it perhaps would have been more relevant, but the accident was very fast, it was something between two and three seconds.”

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.