Instinctively she tried to turn the wheel further to the left; more effort, surely, would turn the wheel.
She felt no further response from the car's front end.
The Ptarmigan was now going straight on.
Flat out.
She was doing a hundred and ninety five miles an hour.
In the blink of an eye the car was running – tangentially – to the corner. It didn’t have long before it would leave the track altogether. On Sabatino's current line, there were fewer than fifty metres before she would reach the edge of the tarmac, marked by the sweeping line of red-and-white kerbstones on the outside of the corner. She hammered the brakes.
Her foot went straight to the floor.
Nothing happened.
Sabatino was now leaving the solid surface of the track.
Her Ptarmigan was still travelling at over a hundred and ninety miles an hour as she went out onto the loose surface of the gravel trap.
In horror, Sabatino lifted her eyes – extrapolating the line of her trajectory.
The scenery ahead of her was getting rapidly larger.
She turned the steering wheel again which responded on the looser surface of the gravel, giving her some left lock – a ploughing effect to offer resistance – to slow herself down.
Sabatino had her first moment of panic.
Ahead of her the bank of red-and-white tyres – stacked in front of the concrete perimeter wall – was looming. Sabatino was sensing the full effect a parachutist would recognize as ground-rush. The same zooming-in sensation applied to the three-metre-high wire mesh fence behind the tyres – and, beyond that – to the shapes and faces of hundreds of spectators lounging in the sun, spread out up the turf terraces of the grassy bank on the outside of the circuit.
Quartano saw the TV producer switch cameras again, this time back to the overhead shot from the helicopter. The tycoon was glued to the screen, along with the rest of the television audience around the world. He saw the unfolding horror of the Formula One car's failure to turn in – and the turquoise Ptarmigan going straight on at that corner.
The camera showed the Ptarmigan shoot off the course – straight across the gravel. Everybody's eyes flitted back and forth, trying to predict where the car was going, and the dreaded fulfilment of that path. People realized that – with the massive speed the car was still doing – a huge impact was unavoidable. Everyone knew deep down they shouldn’t really be watching this.
It had to happen.
Wham!
The Ptarmigan smashed into the red-and-white tyre wall at a terrifyingly steep angle.
The front end of the car disintegrated instantaneously – exactly as it was meant to. Carbon fibre in the front wing was pulverized to shards, splinters and dust. The nose cone crumpled. Both suspension systems – the V-shaped wishbones supporting both front wheels – gave way, as the two bulky wheels folded inwards.
But then the real horror began.
With so much kinetic energy still undissipated, it had to go somewhere. In the slow motion of the replay, TV viewers watched what seemed to be the inevitable. The Ptarmigan's crumpling nose cone was burying itself in the bottom of the tyre wall.
The energy had to spill over.
The red-and-white tyres were bulging unnaturally.
The car's nose, right in underneath them, could only then act as a pivot.
The back end started to rise.
The Ptarmigan was beginning to rotate, the rear wheels were leaving the ground.
In a split second the whole car was rotating.
It was soon passing through the vertical. At that moment, a rotational force developed through the car, having the effect of lifting its front end. What was left of the nose became dislodged from the bottom of the tyre wall, its former pivot point. The car was suddenly free to continue on.
It was starting to somersault.
Now, upside down, the back wheels were leading the inverted car; they were about to hit the wire mesh fence.
This should have absorbed some of the energy. Except the leading limb of the car – the upside-down-and-back-to-front right rear wheel – slammed into one of the upright “I”-sectioned girders supporting the three-metre mesh. This stanchion was no match for the force coming its way. Nevertheless, with the car hitting it asymmetrically, catching only one rear wheel, the upright did put up enough resistance before buckling to spin the front end of the car – clockwise – swinging it round horizontally and slamming it into the wire almost exactly side on. The turquoise car was now twisting. As it did so, the rear wheel that had caught the stanchion was ripped from the car, its tether snapping like cotton; bouncing off the “I”-sectioned girder, it was shot up high and fast into the air.
For a fraction of a second the mesh bowed significantly outwards. But under the force of impact, its fastenings were ripped away from the other stanchions to either side. In a moment, the wire itself gave way too, the mesh snapping from top to bottom, whipping apart like a set of double doors being kicked violently open.
These latest forces on the Ptarmigan were not what it was designed to withstand.
Bits burst from the car in a turquoise cloud.
Tethers on the collapsed front wheels, still retaining them like swinging conkers, finally gave up the flight. Viewers saw both wheels catapulted away at frighteningly high speed, twenty-odd kilograms of wheel and brake assembly flying off – hurtling away like cannon balls. Other debris was slung from the car as the airborne Ptarmigan continued to twist and rotate. Carbon fibre – barge boards, radiator pods, large chunks of the rear wing – were all hurled outwards.
What was left of the twisting upside-down car, principally the monocoque – with the driver still inside – was also spinning like a rotor blade as it slammed into the turf at the bottom of the grassy bank. It impacted heavily with the ground. The chassis disintegrated – its components exploding outwards. The engine block broke off, tumbling away separately like a rugby ball, on up the slope.
This hillside was crammed full of spectators.
Sabatino's spinning monocoque crashed into the middle of this block of humanity. People, bodies, were crushed, caught up, rolled under and then hurled away by the rotational energy.
