It was pretty damn unusual to see Sebastian Vettel and Lance Stroll make contact on the cooldown lap after the Malaysian Grand Prix. It wasn’t a complete one-off though, as these seven videos show.
The 2016 Monaco GP was one of Esteban Gutierrez’s many 11th-place finishes in 2016. It was a solid drive, but on the cooldown lap he struggled to keep his Haas under control as the tyres cooled and the rain started to come down again, and he slid gently into the wall at Portier.
Embarrassing? Sure, but hey, at least he waited until after the race to lose it there, unlike a certain Ayrton Senna in 1988!
A strange accident which happened due to a quirk of the Marina Bay circuit, Fabio Leimer was on his way to the podium after finishing third when he T-boned Alexander Rossi.
It happened because the GP2 paddock in Singapore isn’t accessed through the pit lane like at most circuits, but rather through a gap in the wall after turn five. Marshals were directing Rossi into the gap when Leimer came barrelling past, unaware of what was going on ahead.
Of course it’s happened in a Nascar race! At Talladega in 2003 the last few laps were completed without incident, but as the massive pack of cars started to slow down after taking the flag Bobby Labonte got turned around in the middle of the pack, triggering a multi-car pileup.
After finishing the race 11th, KTM rider Pol Espargaro rolled off the throttle to complete his cooldown lap but bizarrely and unexpectedly fell off at Copse corner shortly afterwards. It turned out his engine had suddenly cut out, causing the rear wheel to lock and throwing him from the bike.
Roberto Mehri was racing in F1 for Manor in 2015 but unusually decided to carry on racing in Formula Renault 3.5 at the same time, presumably so he didn’t forget what it was like to drive a competitive car. He had a colossal moment of brain fade at the Red Bull Ring though when he chose to suddenly slow down right after the finish line because of an apparent ‘suspension problem’.
Behind him, Nicolas Latifi hadn’t seen Mehri crawling along and was launched into the air. Both drivers were OK, but stewards didn’t buy Mehri’s suspension problem excuse, deciding to disqualify him from the race and ban him from the next one.
March driver Vittorio Brambilla was leading the very rainy Austrian Grand Prix in 1975 when officials decided it was just too wet to continue. The race was stopped, but instead of red flags being shown the marshal on the start-finish straight put out the chequered flag, meaning the race was completely over.
37-year-old Brambilla (who had never won a GP before) was so overjoyed at winning his first race that he lost it as soon as he crossed the line and hit the wall, leaving him to complete the slow-down lap with a badly bent front end.
A little different this one, mainly because the crashes were deliberate. Once the race was finished an angry Brad Keselowski took a swipe at Denny Hamlin on the track, and then in the pits hit the back of Matt Kenseth and Tony Stewart, who retaliated by reversing into Keselowski. Then there was a fight in the paddock, because Nascar.
