“One of my biggest fears in life is landing upside down in a race car, as I can get pretty claustrophobic," he explained, "Until Australia, I’d never had to worry about it, as I’d never flipped a race car but, just my luck, I had to deal with exactly that. I took a few deep breaths, established that I wasn’t hurt in any way, then radioed the guys in the pits to say I was okay. I stayed in the car, as I knew it would be pretty awkward to try and get out on my own, so I hung in upside down until the safety crew arrived.
“They eventually put the car on its side and I popped the seat belts and freed myself from the tub - it was a little easier than if I had tried to get out on my own. It's standard procedure to go back to the medical centre and get checked out following an accident like that, so I headed over there. They kept me monitored for half an hour to let the adrenaline settle and see if any major aches or pains developed, but thankfully they didn’t.”
With both Hinchcliffe and Murchison agreeing that what had happened was simply an on-track racing incident, there was no ill-feeling following their respective retirements.
“It was
absolutely a racing incident,” Hinchcliffe insisted, “It was nobody’s fault and there was nothing intentional about it. Christian kindly came up to me afterwards to see if I was alright, as he obviously had the best view in the house to see me flipping over. As a fellow driver, he would have known it was a bit of a hairy shunt, so it was cool of him to come over and check everything was fine - which it was.”
Hinchcliffe's roll was the latest in a line of similar accidents in the season-and-a-half of A1GP competition, with Basil Shabaan and Hayanari Shimoda (twice) testing the strength of the Lola chassis in 2005-06. The car's safety provisions were again praised again following the Eastern Creek accident, with no-one more grateful for the safety measures in place in the design and build of the chassis and roll-hoops than the driver himself.
