Rewind: Martin Brundle's 1996 barrel-roll
Wednesday, 22 March 2023
Martin Brundle did one racing lap in one Grand Prix in Melbourne; nearly 30 years later, the British driver turned TV commentator still gets asked about his miraculous escape from a massive accident in Albert Park's maiden F1® Grand Prix.
The record books will say Martin Brundle's 1996 Australian Grand Prix lasted less than two minutes – 1 minute 56 seconds, to be precise. But for a driver who raced in Formula 1® with aplomb for 12 seasons and has carved out an award-winning TV commentary career since, his cameo in the history of Albert Park will never be forgotten.
The Briton began his first F1® season for Jordan at Melbourne's first race in 1996, and qualified just 19th of the 22 starters; it's a vulnerable place to be in the early stages of any race, let alone the first one of a new season at a new circuit.
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Brundle negotiated the opening pair of corners and then looked for a gap as the thundering field jostled for track position into Turn 3, but found his path blocked when David Coulthard's McLaren suddenly juked left and clipped the Sauber of Johnny Herbert. With nowhere to go, Brundle's Jordan ploughed into the back of both cars, launched skywards, landed, rolled, and finally came to a halt with half the engine snapped off, its gearbox missing.
"I had a lovely clear road ahead of me, and then suddenly there was nothing but cars going slowly," Brundle said afterwards.
"I was flat-out in sixth doing about 290km/h, so the closing speed was too high for me to do anything about it. I was a passenger on a high-speed merry-go-round. The accident seemed to go on for a very long time ..."
Three corners into Melbourne's first F1® race, Albert Park had its first signature moment – but the story didn't end there. Brundle crawled out of the wreckage, and once he realised he'd miraculously escaped injury, did what every race driver would do – work out how he could take the restart in the spare car.
Once arriving back at the pits, the sight of Brundle running to get medical permission to take the restart was jarring – running wasn't something Brundle often did after suffering leg injuries from a crash in Dallas 12 years earlier – but he was a man on a mission.
"I wanted to get straight into the spare car and they said to me 'you're going to have to get Sid's (F1® Medical Delegate Professor Sid Watkins) approval first," Brundle recalls.
"I ran all the way to the back (of the grid), Sid got out of the (medical) car and said 'I can see you're OK, I've just watched you running ... what's the date?' It was my dad's birthday, the 10th of March ... so he said 'you can race' – that's all it took."
Brundle was oblivious to the grandstands watching his every move play out on the big screens around the track, but not for long.
"A marshal happened to say 'what did he (Watkins) say?' ... I didn't realise everybody in the world was watching, so when my thumb went up (in response) everyone went mad," he says.
Adrenaline coursing through his veins, ankles aching from his impromptu pit-lane sprint, Brundle was strapped into the spare Jordan as the field got going a second time. He didn't go for long; on lap 2, he came across the Ligier of Pedro Diniz at – you guessed it – Turn 3. Brundle ran into Diniz, slowly spun and stalled – his race run.
Brundle is listed as the first retirement of Albert Park's first F1® race (Herbert didn't take the restart) after less than two minutes, but nearly three decades later, the memories of that shunt still burn bright. Brundle has often commented that he gets asked about Melbourne 1996 more than any of his 157 other Grands Prix.
"I can still remember that accident from 1996 in slow motion," he says.
"To be honest, my head was probably not quite where it needed to be (for the restart) – but you're hard-wired to just race again."
