Brundle suffered on-air heart attack at Monaco!

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Sky Sports F1 racing commentator Martin Brundle has revealed he suffered a minor heart attack while covering last year's Monaco Grand Prix.

The former Formula One driver told attendees at the Autosport International show in Birmingham that he had become unwell as he sprinted from the commentary box to the podium where he was due to talk with the top three finishers.

“I had a small heart attack running to do the podium in Monaco,” he said on Thursday.

Despite the cardiac incident, Brundle was still able to fulfil his duties and went ahead with the interview with race winner Lewis Hamilton and podium finishers Daniel Ricciardo and Sergio Perez, with no one any the wiser at the time.

However he subsequently underwent what a medical procedure for what he described on Twitter as "a serious heart issue", and was subsequently absent from Sky Sports coverage of the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal two weeks later.

"I ended up with a 23mm stent in my left arterial descending," he explained.

Despite this he was recovered in time to compete at Le Mans in an LMP3 car just a few days later, where he took pole position for the race.

“I sat at the press conference [after qualifying] and there was a 17-year-old and a 19-year-old sitting alongside me, and I thought: ‘That’s not bad for an old geezer, 57!'.

"I didn’t think I could do the race, but the cardio guy said ‘Yeah, you can do the race, just don’t forget your blood thinners’," he recalled. "I had bruises coming out of my chest but I thought ‘I love Le Mans, I’m not going to miss this’.”

Brundle went on to finish in second place in the race.

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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.