Felipe Massa admitted Romain Grosjean’s heavy crash during practice for the Malaysian Grand Prix after contact with a loose drain cover reminded him of his accident during qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix back in 2009 that almost cost him his career.
Massa was hit on the head by a spring from the back of Rubens Barrichello’s Brawn Grand Prix machine on the run down to turn four at the Hungaroring eight years ago, which caused facial damage to the Brazilian whilst driving for Scuderia Ferrari, and subsequently ended his season.
The current Williams Martini Racing driver was the one following Grosjean when the Haas F1 Team racer hit the drain cover and crashed, and the veteran of 263 race starts was happy that nothing came back to hit him, and that Grosjean was lucky to walk away unscathed from an incident that should have been prevented, had the FIA controlled everything in the right way.
“Fortunately this time, nothing flew over my car, and it was good also that Romain didn’t have any issue with the accident – for sure his car not, but him, he’s OK,” said Massa to Motorsport.com.
“I think the FIA need to control everything in the right way, so we don’t have these things anymore.
“I was just the car behind, the first thing I thought was I had already a spring on my head, so maybe a drain is a little bit too much!
“I could see that maybe he passed over something, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. But fortunately nothing happened.”
