There’s nothing quite like being trackside at an F1 race to soak up the action and atmosphere, but one local F1 spectator got more than he bargained for after a piece of debris from Kevin Magnussen’s Haas hit him at the 2023 Australian GP over the weekend.
Will Sweet was standing near turn 2 with his wife when Magnussen crashed into the barriers in the race’s final stages, just before the two Alpine drivers crashed into each other on a race day filled with carnage. The sweeping left-hander caught Magnussen out, sending his right rear tire flying into the air along with a mess of debris, forcing the Danish driver out of the race and securing him a DNF for the third round of the season.
“Magnussen goes flying down the track and then all of a sudden, something hits me in the arm and a bunch of people start running around, scrambling,” Sweet explained to 3AW radio this morning. “It slapped me in the arm and I was just standing there bleeding.”
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“My arm was covering where my neck would’ve been, but if that had hit my fiancee, it would’ve got her right in the head,” he went on. “When I picked up the piece of wheel, someone else managed to let me get it, I realised how big it was and how heavy it was. Part of it was shredded and really sharp, if it hit me in a different angle, it could’ve been horrendous,”
From Magnussen’s perspective behind the wheel, the event was innocuous despite the damage he managed to cause the car.
“I didn’t even feel it, so it definitely wasn’t something that felt big in the car,” said Magnussen in a post-race interview. “But it was enough to crack the rim and take the tyre off. Unfortunate – we were in P12, so at the time it didn’t look like we would be able to score points.”
It was a wild day out on the track for everyone involved in the 2023 Australian GP, but perhaps none more so than Sweet, who’ll have an epic spectator story to tell for the rest of his life and F1 debris the scar on his forearm to prove it.
