Television pictures showing the front of
Heikki Kovalainen's
McLaren missing following its accident at the Circuit de Catalunya on Sunday naturally caused concern for the health of the driver, but the team insists that the chassis performed as intended.
With Kovalainen being carted off on a stretcher and the remains of the MP4/23 clearly showing the crane carrying it through the gap where the nose should have been, the worst was feared, but the Finn was eventually diagnosed to have little more than a mild concussion and bruising.
"He has had a full head scan and there is no significant bruising or damage - that's extremely good news," McLaren CEO Martin Whitmarsh confirmed, "Heikki was briefly unconscious, but he was lucid soon after the accident - and I'm told he was actually quite jolly, which is fairly typical."
McLaren continues to analyse data from the incident, but remains confident that it will find that debris caused the sudden deflation of the left front tyre and sent Kovalainen spearing off, across the gravel trap, into - and under - the tyre wall
"We think he suffered a wheel rim failure that caused the tyre to deflate almost instantaneously," Whitmarsh confirmed, "It's possible that some debris worked its way inside the rim, but we still have to analyse that. It was a new wheel and we don't think it was a structural failure. There were some score marks, but we don't know whether they were caused by debris or by his trip across the gravel trap. We've got to answer that later.
"It was a big accident. Cars brake from about 260km/h at that point on the circuit, and he didn't scrub off a huge amount of speed before impact. He was still travelling pretty quickly when he hit the tyre wall, and the impact lasted about 100 milliseconds. That might not sound much, but 20-30 milliseconds would be more usual."
Whitmarsh confirmed that the car was a write-off, but insisted that it had performed as designed, preventing Kovalainen from suffering more serious injuries.
