Catastrophic F1 Suspension failure at the Shanghai GP!

In my many years of watching both contemporary and historic F1 footage, I have never seen anything quite like this.  This past weekend was the Formula One race at Shanghai, and the following suspension failure happened spontaneously to Toro Rosso driver Sebastien Buemi just a few minutes into the practice session.  It looks almost as if C4 were detonated simultaneously on both sides of the car, as the front suspension explodes into a shower of razor sharp carbon fiber shrapnel around the driver.  Miraculously no one was injured, but the event was certainly scary, and could have turned into a tragedy without modern circuit safety barriers.  In the case of this type of failure, the wheels of an F1 car are supposed to remain tethered to the wreck, but in this case, the suspension parts to which the wheels were tethered simply disintegrated, leaving the wheels as potentially lethal projectiles.  As far as I have read, they still haven't precisely determined what happened, but clearly the fact that the car was under a major braking load at the end of a straight contributed a lot of energy to this failure.  I couldn't figure out how to embed the video, so please watch it here! It is a MUST SEE.

Comments

[Michael K.]

OH.

MY.

GOSH!