“He’s walking, he’s walking!” – Romain Grosjean crashed at Bahrain and somehow made it out alive, recount his Haas race engineers.
Romain Grosjean was the story of the F1 2020 season, as he survived a fireball crash at Bahrain. This massively concerned Dominic Haines, Haas’ race engineer. He spoke about this awful day on Canal Plus, and how the entire event transpired.
“On the first lap of the race, one of the key things we look at is just making sure the data from the car is coming back okay, so we are really focusing on the telemetry data that’s streaming. All of a sudden the data stopped, and it stopped when he was going 200km/h and just cut out.
“Immediately, you go on the radio and say ‘are you okay?’ and the worst thing to hear is silence. There were around 30 seconds that was just an awful sensation. [But then] someone saw another feed ‘he’s walking, he’s walking’ and I heard that come in my ear and then you know, okay, he’s out of the car, he’s okay. But until then it was just a horrible, horrible day.”
Wow. Incredible Canal Plus animation of @RGrosjean‘s accident. Most accurate I’ve seen to date.
Have collected the animation clips into one video here (footage was placed amongst interview footage in the documentary).
h/t @RacingLines #F1 pic.twitter.com/QL0d2QU2ae
— Peke_Formula1 (@Peke_Formula1) February 20, 2021
Chief race engineer worried about the worst for Romain Grosjean
Ayao Komatsu, Haas’ chief race engineer, conceded about being “worried about the worst”.
“When the race started, I was watching both of our guys’ onboard [footage]. Initially, I didn’t think it was Romain and then I saw on the GPS ‘Oh, GRO, stopped’. I don’t know the best way to say it, but I still couldn’t believe it… was worried about the worst. I just couldn’t process in my head that someone could walk out of that fire so quickly.”
