Zhou Guanyu has spoken about the high-speed crash he walked away from at the start of last weekend’s British Grand Prix, the Alfa Romeo driver recounting in vivid detail how it felt flying across the gravel at Turn 1.
Zhou’s car ended up taking the brunt of the impact after Pierre Gasly and George Russell came together on Lap 1 at Silverstone, the rookie driver’s Alfa Romeo flipping and skidding across the floor before being thrown into the barriers beyond the Turn 1 run-off area. Ahead of this Sprint weekend in Austria, he looked back at the incident.
“Yes, I mean for me when the flip happened, the first thing I was trying to do was to release my hand off the steering wheel because you never know, you can break your hand quite easily with a crash like that.
ALL THE ANGLES: Relive the dramatic multi-car crash at the start of the British Grand Prix
“And then the next thing I tried to do, because when I was rolling on the ground, I knew I’d be facing a massive impact coming up because the car wasn’t stopping… I tried to lock myself in that position that is the safest possible. Just bracing for the last impact. So holding my hands backwards but keeping it reasonably [tense] so it doesn’t go flying around when I have the last impact.
“Basically, I was just waiting for the last stop [and] hit – and once I was basically stopped, I didn’t know where I was because I was upside down and the next thing I felt was there was some leaking from, I don’t know, I wasn’t sure if it was my body or from the car, so I just tried to switch the engine – the engine was still on by then – because I knew if the fire starts, it would be difficult to get out. So I switched my engine off,” he said.