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Indian Driver Chandhok Upbeat After Near-Misses at Monaco GP
Alan Baldwin | May 17, 2010

With just four laps to go in the Monaco Grand Prix, Jarno Trulli, left, went up and over Karun Chandhok of HRT. Chandhok was running in 14th when the accident took place.  (AFP Photo) With just four laps to go in the Monaco Grand Prix, Jarno Trulli, left, went up and over Karun Chandhok of HRT. Chandhok was running in 14th when the accident took place.  (AFP Photo)
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Monaco. Karun Chandhok hailed Sunday’s Monaco Grand Prix as one of his best races yet, despite running over a rival’s steering wheel and then crashing out with a car skimming his helmet.

The Indian Formula One driver was running in 14th place when his HRT and the Lotus of Italian racer Jarno Trulli tangled at the Rascasse corner with four laps remaining.

Trulli had tried to go past on the inside, but ran out of space as Chandhok turned. The Lotus lifted and went over the top of the other car.

“Jarno just tried something silly, really,” Chandhok said. “I don’t think he would have even had enough steering lock to get around the corner from the angle he was coming at. He would have done the old Schumacher 2006 parking move.

“He has apologized,” Chandhok said. “I quite like Jarno, he’s a nice guy, and I think when he apologizes he knows he’s screwed up.

“Fortunately, I was a bit lucky as I ducked and he went over my head,” he said. “It didn’t actually touch me, but it looked worse than it actually was.

“But it was very frustrating because that was probably my best race of the year in terms of pace and we were racing the other two new teams.”

The Indian had earlier driven over a steering wheel tossed onto the track by Rubens Barrichello after he crashed his Williams on the approach to Casino square.

The wheel, a piece of equipment worth around $50,000, then became jammed under the HRT until it worked loose.

“What was he doing?,” Chandhok said of Barrichello.

“You see on the video that he just throws it.

“I could feel it scraping all the way to Mirabeau and then the noise stopped. One of the marshals has reported back that they saw it fall out of my car in the tunnel, and then Bruno [Senna] ran over it. That steering wheel has been well and truly Hispania-ed.”

Barrichello said later on his Twitter feed that he had thrown the wheel out because he “wanted to get out as soon as possible. After the shunt I was facing the wrong side of the track and the car was on fire.”

Patrick Head, the Williams co-owner, was philosophical on a day that saw his team wreck two cars.

“I think he’d just had a very big impact,” Head said of Barrichello, “and he didn’t follow the instructions to put it back on the steering column. But if you are standing in the middle of a 120 mph [193 kph] corner, you tend to think let’s get out of here as quickly as you can.”



Reuters