Mark Webber has branded the corner where
Heikki Kovalainen crashed during the Spanish Grand Prix as the worst possible place to have an accident at the Circuit de Catalunya.
The Australian, currently leading
Formula One's safety campaign, explained that the run-off area and the angle of the barriers relative to the Finn's trajectory had played a major part in the severity of the incident, which left those drivers still on track concerned for their colleague's health.
"If Heikki's accident had happened two seconds later, he would have been fine and controlled the car, but it probably happened on the worst section of that whole track," Webber wrote in his regular
BBC column, "The first thing to say is that the run-off on that corner is too tight, and we need to have a look at it because any driver that has an error there is going to have a big crash.
"I had actually been round that part of the track on my scooter on Thursday afternoon to see the tyre barriers because, in testing,
Sebastien Bourdais had crashed within five metres of that point. Sebastien made a mistake, whereas Heikki had a failure but the result was the same. The problem with Heikki was that he went in at a nasty angle.
"It was a really nasty one and it is never nice to see a car buried that deep into the barriers. The conveyer belt system, which keeps the tyres together, works very well for a slightly different angled contact because it is supposed to cushion the whole thing and keep the tyres intact as well.
F1 cars are like a pencil and it meant he went under and penetrated the conveyer belt.
"It is a nasty angle as it is like being in a sled and, with the amount of pressure that comes along the top of the chassis, the next thing exposed in the forward section is your head. It doesn't matter if it was ten rows of tyres or 20 rows - it was going to happen at that angle."
Webber admitted that he had been grateful to the
FIA representative who had signalled to the drivers that Kovalainen was okay after the shunt.
"As a driver, you never like to see the medical car or when they cover up the accident scene," he explained, "At the time, I just asked the team whether it was
Lewis Hamilton or Heikki, and we continued to drive round. The good thing was that one of the FIA guys gave us a thumbs-up when we came past, which was fantastic of him."
