F1 News
Doohan surprised: 'I have to learn what caused that crash'
The Australian GP finished quite quickly for Jack Doohan. While he was not the first rookie to crash out, he did not survive the first lap in Melbourne. Although the young driver is not happy to finish the weekend this way, he still sees the positives as well.
Doohan qualified in P14 for his home race, however, he could not make up much ground this day. The Australian driver lost control of his car already during the first lap, and put his Alpine in the wall.
"For sure I was [hurting] when [the crash] happened. But in this sport things happen very quickly as we've just seen. The next round is already almost upon us. It was an unfortunate way but a lesson is learned. I've digested it. There's a lot of positives that we have to take away from this weekend. For me they outweigh this negative. I'm looking forward to bouncing back for next weekend," he began to GPblog among others.
Still Doohan was proud of his qualifying performance, and that is something he wants to take with him for the rest of the season. "The pace was strong. I think yesterday afternoon if we could have completed that Q2 lap we would have been comfortably in the Q3 on a high 1:15, and that already would have put us in a good place. I think P8, P7, was on the cards yesterday afternoon, if, buts and maybes, but it's good confidence to know going in for the rest of the season."
What caused the incident?
Suddently on Lap 1, it seemed like someone suddenly pulled a rug below Doohan's Alpine, as he found the barrier afterwards. The Australian himself is still looking for an explanation. "It seemed I lost it on the third to fourth gear upshift. As soon as I went into fourth I lost the car. So some things that I'm going to need to understand. Because for me that wasn't out of the normal, but a constant learning process. Unfortunately this one has big consequences. But I've definitely learnt and I'm going to ensure that it doesn't happen again."
He added: "I think maybe a combination of the white line. But it seems that we had a spike in RPM when I've upshifted to fourth, so we're just double checking to make sure that everything's behaving itself, and maybe a little bit less right foot, a little bit more left."
This article was written in collaboration with Kimberley Hoefnagel
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