Magnussen explains 'strange' crash which damaged chassis

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Kevin Magnussen described the crash which ruled him out of qualifying on Saturday as "very strange" but believes he can recover in today's Canadian Grand Prix.

Late in FP3, Magnussen hit the wall heavily on the exit of Turn 7, bringing out the red flags which saw the session end prematurely. The incident saw Magnussen miss qualifying and he says there was an unusually low amount of grip available on cold tyres which caused the crash.

"It was really strange," Magnussen said. "We had put a set [of tyres] on that I had run already and they hadn’t been warmed up in the blankets, they didn’t have time to get it warm. We just stuck them on and they were very slippery. And it is weird, because we have done it before and been alright. But maybe because the track temperature was so low it didn’t work. But it caught me out.

"I was just going out of the corner, hit a bump and it snapped massively and then I hit the wall."

And Magnussen admits the damage was severe due to the angle at which he hit the wall, with the left hand side of the car taking the full impact.

"It is pretty much a different car, everything was damaged. It was a very hard hit, even though it wasn’t so fast I hit it so square.

"We will go back to the best chassis we had before that. This will be repaired and I am sure when it is repaired it is going to be the best chassis still. It is not so damaged the tub, but it needs repairing. It hit so much on the side, so it was only the crash structure and the crash structure takes quite a long time to fix. So when that is done, this chassis will be pretty much intact."

Despite the incident, Magnussen is confident he can still have a successful race.

"We are not that much worse off. I could have probably qualified 15^th or 16^th maybe. So it is not so much and we have a free choice if it starts to rain and we can change stuff and start from the pit lane. It is alright. There are always positives.

"Fingers crossed for rain and we will see - a bit like 2011 would be nice because that race anyone could have won. I’m not taking anything away from Jenson [Button] who won then... but if you do something like that... Jenson is an expert on that, but what I am saying is you don’t need to be fast in those circumstances. You need to take the right decisions and Jenson just took the perfect decision every time."

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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.