Lewis Hamilton ‘almost broke his back’ as full scale of Fernando Alonso collision emerges

Lewis Hamilton has claimed that he ‘almost broke his back’ as a result of his first-lap collision with Fernando Alonso at the Belgian Grand Prix.The 37-year-old made contact with his rival as they jostled for position at Les Combes despite having acres of space to pull off a move around the outside of the corner.

Hamilton was sent flying into the air before his Mercedes car slowed to a crawl as he attempted to limp back to the pits, but the seven-time champion was eventually forced to pull over at the side of the track. He insisted later on Sunday that he was fortunate to walk away from the incident without any serious injuries after crashing back down to the ground from a decent height just moments after the collision.

“Well, yeah, I almost broke my back coming down so it’s a big, big hit,” said Hamilton, as reported by Crash.net.

“I remember just looking at the ground, so it was quite high. It was definitely high up. I’m grateful to be still alive and in shape.

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“I could hear something was broken in the gearbox. So yeah, I mean, coming down I would have broken so much in the back end, so I was told to stop. But obviously in that moment you’re hopeful you can keep going, but yeah, not meant to be.”

It remains to be seen whether Hamilton will be able to redeem himself at this weekend’s Dutch Grand Prix as he looks to bounce back with a much-improved showing at the very next time of asking. He faces the possibility of receiving a potential grid penalty, though, if Mercedes are forced into changing his power unit as a result of the damage picked up at Spa.

Hamilton’s gearbox is also cracked after the hard landing he experienced in Belgium, with the incident the latest in a string of unfortunate twists for the Silver Arrows over the course of this season. Team principal Toto Wolff went on to admit that their ongoing struggles are proving harder to cope with than anything Mercedes have experienced before, with the German outfit performing worse than they had initially expected last weekend.

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“It’s very difficult to cope with these swings,” said Wolff. “We had a totally sub-par performance in qualifying, then in the race sometimes we go three seconds a lap faster.

“There are big question marks about what is going on. It’s not where we should be with the structure and knowledge to understand a racing car but we don’t with this one.

“Whatever we decide for next year needs to be carefully evaluated because clearly our data does not give us the results, doesn’t correlate with the reality.”

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