First off, all hail the safety engineers in Formula 1. That Mark Webber walked away from this crash on Sunday would be a miracle, if it weren’t for all the time and effort that goes into making F1 cars as safe as possible.
Today, Webber says he is doing OK, and like he was doing pretty soon after his shunt, his focus in on the British Grand Prix:
“I have a few cuts and bruises, but otherwise I’m fine. What’s frustrating was that this accident should never have happened. I understand as well as anyone that F1 isn’t a charity event; you have to fight for every position – but not when you’re five seconds off the pace and you have one of the quickest cars in the pack behind you. I mean, how long was Heikki going to stay ahead of me? Another 15 seconds? He must be asking himself whether it was worth it.â€
[snip]
“There’s still everything to play for. To be 24 points behind Lewis is nothing when you consider that I scored 50 points in the space of eight days a few races ago. And we’re taking nothing for granted at Red Bull Racing; we need to continue working flat-out because our rivals are bringing updates to every race. There are now four drivers who have two wins apiece – Lewis, Jenson, myself and Seb – and it’s going to be a fascinating second half of the year.â€
[snip]
“We hope the RB6 will be competitive at Silverstone, because the track has lots of high-speed corners, through which our car excels. I feel a little tender today, but I’ll be fine come the race weekend and I cannot wait to get back in the car.â€
Webber also is talking about the crash. It sounds like he’s blaming Heikki Kovalainen a little bit more than he was, according to the reports we got on our U.S. broadcast of the race:
“Initially, I thought Heikki was going to let me through without a fight, but as we approached Turn 12 he started moving towards the middle of the track. As I pulled out from his slipstream, he braked and before I knew what had happened I was pointing at the sky. The telemetry showed that he braked 80 metres earlier for that corner than I had on the previous lap, so it was completely unexpected.â€
“My car felt like it was airborne for a long time. I had time to worry about whether there were any bridges at that point on the track, which, luckily, there weren’t. If there had been one, I would have hit it because I went pretty high. But the car stood up to the accident well. This chassis – number 4 – has been good to me: I used it to win back-to-back races in Barcelona and Monaco, and now it’s saved me from serious injury in Valencia.
An absolutely terrifying crash, without a doubt. He might want to get some pieces of that chassis for good luck.