Schumacher explains what triggered “weird” Monaco GP crash

Schumacher’s heavy crash caused the Monaco race to be red-flagged, as the gearbox was broken off the back of his Haas car after he hit the barrier in the middle of the Swimming Pool complex and then slid into the Tecpro barrier at the exit.

At the time the German was mystified as to why he lost control so suddenly in the high-speed section of the track, while his engineer suggested on the radio that he might have tapped the barrier immediately beforehand, and thus broken something.

However, having looked at the data, Schumacher now admits that he’d simply gone wide at Tabac and cooled his tyres on a wet patch, and then hit another a few seconds later at the Swimming Pool when he ran just 10cm wider than previously.

“The whole track was quite damp in parts,” he said when asked by Autosport about what the data had revealed. “And some others were quite dry. We came a bit wide in Turn 12 [Tabac] which cooled down the right hand side.

“And then when going through the chicane, I actually took it easy for the circumstances, for the conditions, that there were.

“And I just misplaced it a bit, and was basically 10 centimetres on the wet patch, which then triggers a double wheelspin in that case, because we have so much power. And that kind of then just threw the car into a half-spin, I’m trying to correct it, and it goes into the wall.”

Schumacher insisted he had no prior warning that he might lose the car in such a way.

“No, it came out of the blue,” he said. “And I spoke to other people. Most of the feedback that I got said it does look really weird. So obviously, we can’t check if anything broke, actually. But data suggests not, so just seems like a wet patch.

“It was really odd, because also the accident itself wasn’t in any way hard. To have it split in two again is quite unfortunate, because obviously it’s a lot of damage.”

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