Warts and all: My Donington crash…

You may have noticed a distinct lack of footage from my qualifying ‘incident’ at Donington.

I’ve already made it clear it was totally my mistake, and I was an idiot – even if you can put a lot of that down to inexperience and/or bad luck.  But there is a problem with onboard footage, sometimes…

You may remember a video from a few years back where a Porsche 944 driver got crucified after seemingly pushing another car into the pit wall at Cadwell Park?  Everyone wanted his blood, but a few voices pointed out that the 944 could just as easily have been trying to pull into the pits, and it was all a totally innocent mistake.  The point is, the camera won’t always show you the truth.

We are all competitive on track, and all want to win – but (I hope) it would be extremey rare that any of us want to actually make anyone else crash.  It’s expensive, won’t win you any friends, and people can die.

When I looked back over my footage of that first lap of qualifying, the camera shows I dived up the inside of Buxton in an impossible move, and took him out.

Of course, I know this isn’t what happened, but without having you feel that I was at maximum braking trying my best just not to hit Buxton, it doesn’t look good. 

Then there’s the adrenalin factor – when you’re on track everything happens slowly and you just react to it.  Looking back at the footage it’s not always clear that you did have time to assess the situation – in this case that I wasn’t going to stop in time, so angled the car hoping I’d pull it all up before I even got to the corner.

Anyway, I promised you warts and all on this blog, and the fact is I should have braked earlier or got my tyres up to temp sooner, and this wouldn’t have happened.

So here’s the full onboard camera footage from that lap: