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Gasly explains Hamilton near miss

14:46, 05 Oct 2018

byAdam Newton

There was a scary moment during FP1 for Pierre Gasly and Lewis Hamilton, when the Frenchman was caught going slowly on the racing line and Hamilton had to take evasive action to avoid him.

Gasly was travelling slowly on the run to the final chicane at the Suzuka circuit when the current championship leader flew around 130R with the intention of attacking the final few corners.

Rather than taking the conventional way to the start/finish straight however, Hamilton was forced onto the run off area after having to swerve to avoid the slow moving Gasly.

It was an incident reminiscent of the one at Baku, also involving Gasly, although this time the future Red Bull driver was the one travelling at speed and just managed to avoid his team mate Brendon Hartley.

Gasly, who received a second reprimand of the season, has now explained the incident from his point of view: “I was really slow because I was preparing my lap and then my engineer told me Lewis was five or six seconds behind me before the quick left-hander.

“When I passed it I had a car in front of me really slow, so I slow down as I thought I had time with the five second gap.

“But the thing was I was at 60kph and by the time I got the message that I was five or six seconds and I think Lewis was already down to 3 seconds or 2.5 because he was at 300kph and I was at 60kph.

“By the time I saw him in the mirror coming of course I knew I was screwed already because I was on the left side and to turn [off the racing line] at that point he would be really surprised and there might be something even bigger.

“I tried to close on the left, I even put one tyre on the grass and I think that was the safest thing to do at that point but I blocked him. It was just a bit of a bad situation.”