Haas driver Romain Grosjean was involved in a spectacular crash at the start of the Bahrain Formula 1 Grand Prix on Sunday, but he survived it virtually unscathed.
The camera showed him extricating himself from the wreckage of the burning car, before jumping over the low wall. He was missing a shoe then, and his helmet seemed to have melted in the heat of the blaze.
“Romain suffered minor burns to his hands and ankles, but he’s ok. He’s under the doctor’s review right now,” Haas wrote on Twitter.
All F1 driver and crew members were standing in the pits and applauded the footage of the 34-year-old Frenchman as he walked away from the crash site, before being sprayed with a fire extinguisher.
“He’s obviously shaken… I would like to thank the emergency team who responded very quickly. The stewards and the FIA people did a very good job, it was scary,” Haas sporting director Gunther Steiner said.
Safety car driver Alan van der Merwe, who usually follows the peloton at the start, reacted quickly to help Grosjean.
“I have never seen so many flames after an impact like this. Romain began to extricate himself from the car on his own, which is quite surprising given the force of the impact. All the systems that were put in place, the halo, the safety barriers, the seat belts, everything worked perfectly,” he said.
According to information relayed by F1, Grosjean was escorted to an ambulance and helicoptered to a hospital in the area, in Manama.
Grosjean, who was starting 19th on the starting grid, dived to his right at the exit of the second turn and his right rear wheel struck the front left wheel of Daniil Kvyat’s Alpha Tauri car.
His car then rose, before hitting head-on an angled rail and exploding under the force of the impact. The passenger compartment of the car separated from the car, before being embedded in the safety rail, in flames.
