Lewis Hamilton was involved in a testing accident in Barcelona on Wednesday while he was driving for Ferrari. The Brit’s shunt occurred nine years after Fernando Alonso, a driver for McLaren, found the wall on the same circuit in one of the most strange preseason incidents in Formula One history.
Alonso’s incident was considerably more serious than Hamilton’s, who emerged from it unscathed. During preseason testing in 2015, the two-time world champion was evacuated to the hospital after colliding at the Turn Three right-hander at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.
Alonso was forced to miss the season opener in Melbourne after doctors determined that he had suffered a concussion. He was replaced by Kevin Magnussen, but the Dane’s McLaren’s engine failed on route to the grid, preventing him from starting the Grand Prix.
Even though this was not particularly unusual for Formula One, the crash’s characteristics caught the interest of both spectators and paddock insiders, leading to a variety of baseless speculations. McLaren blamed an “unpredictable gust of wind” for the shunt.
Alonso contested this when he returned to action in Malaysia. “It was evident that the car had a problem, but the data did not show it,” he claimed. “The solution is not quite obvious. In Turn Three, we undoubtedly had a steering issue, and it locked to the right.
Many fan-led theories were sparked by the lack of a clear explanation. One widely-circulated version of events alleged that Alonso woke up in the hospital believing that it was 1995 and that he was still enjoying his karting career with dreams of reaching F1. Before the Malaysian Grand Prix, the Spanish put an end to these rumors.
Regarding the actual cause of the collision, a lot of people speculated that Alonso was electrified by his McLaren machine while driving, which caused him to lose consciousness for a brief minute and force him to veer straight into the interior wall.
Former Williams manager Peter Windsor, who was in the race control tower when Alonso crashed, backed up the latter portion of this claim. Windsor stated on his YouTube channel that “it might have been some sort of failure on the car, some sort of steering failure, or maybe brake failure.”
