Formula One news

Kovalainen airlifted after rim failure causes crash

Heikki Kovalainen has been air-lifted to hospital in Barcelona after a 150mph crash head-on into the tyre barriers early in the Spanish Grand Prix. Indications are that the Finnish driver has not suffered a serious injury and McLaren believes a problem with the wheel rim caused the accident.

"There's no visible injuries, but he's obviously banged his head and he's just been flown to hospital to check up on the concussion but there are no signs of any serious injury so hopefully he will be back to himself very soon," said McLaren boss Martin Whitmarsh. 

"We had a sudden deflation of tyre pressure - we don't believe it was a tyre failure and we have some evidence that it was a problem with something failing on the tyre rim that caused that deflation," he added. "All the signs are that he'll be fine by the time we get to Turkey."

Ron Dennis added to the wheel rim theory saying, "We think he either had a stone between the rim and suspension - something like that that caused a catastrophic air-loss. The wheel was tight on there so it was something between the two."

View Raikkonen's crash:

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