‘Is that a design flaw, or just an unlucky fluke?’
Backhouse shrugged his lack of strong opinion. ‘Turn Eleven is far more of a curve than a corner. There's more than enough room to brake beforehand if the drivers wished, allowing them to decelerate without destabilising their cars. This is not a corner that most in Formula One would expect drivers to come off at.’
‘Doesn’t that rather back up Yegor Baryshnikov's comment, then, that her attempt to go around the outside was not expected: that she was taking a huge risk – doing something beyond the expected safety of the circuit?’
‘Maybe. All I’m saying at this point is that Sabatino's impact was faster and more severe than I would have expected it to be. Before she got there, hardly any of the energy of the car had been dissipated, which meant that this crash was going to be more violent – go on for longer – and go further – than it ought to have done.
‘And then we come on to the other “break” with modern circuits. Tyres instead of Tecpro barriers.’
‘What difference would that make?’
‘Tecpro dissipates more of the energy away laterally, and doesn’t reassert itself after impact anything like as much.’ At this, he nudged the video on, one frame at a time, until it showed Sabatino's rear wheels lifting off the ground. ‘There,’ he said, ‘do you see the tyres? Having been compressed by the impact, they are now bouncing back – reasserting themselves. I think that force, pushing back and down on the nose cone, was why the back wheels were lifted off the ground, and why the car started to rotate.’
Straker scrutinized the picture. ‘We’ll definitely need to check this further. We could challenge the circuit's design during the trial. At this stage, though, what effect could a steering failure have had on the dynamics of the car?’ he asked.
Backhouse looked at each wheel and the nose cone assembly. ‘By eye, I couldn’t say there was anything different at this point; we can try and confirm some of this when more of the detailed data comes in. At the point of impact, the front wheels are centred, back in the middle of their lock.’
Backhouse cued the video again.
Sabatino's car was now rotating through the vertical and starting to somersault. Once again the film was stopped and studied, but without significance.
It was restarted – again in slow motion. A few moments later it was Straker who leant forwards and froze the frame. He’d done so after the inverted car had slammed into the “I”-sectioned upright and had begun to swing round horizontally. ‘What about here? Does anything untoward happen to the front wheels, now, because of a steering failure?’
After Backhouse had peered at the image for a few seconds he said: ‘Not that I can see.’
On it went again, right through to the point when the car was spinning on up the grassy bank, scything through the people on it.
‘Does it look like a potential steering failure made it any more likely that Sabatino's car would hit or kill any more spectators during the actual crash?’ Straker asked.
Backhouse said: ‘Not that I can tell from this. My key observations, from what we have seen, remain the speed of the car across the gravel – and the angle of impact with the tyre and concrete walls.’
They let the video footage run on. It then became an aerial shot, taken from the helicopter circling directly overhead.
Suddenly Straker's attention was held.
‘Andy, Andy,’ he said quickly, ‘back up – back it up.’
Backhouse touched the slider on the screen.
The clip was replayed. The camera was focusing on a broken part of the wall. Straker tapped a key and froze the frame.
‘What?’ asked Backhouse.
Straker, using a two-finger spread, enlarged his selected area of the image to fill the screen. ‘Take a look at that…’ he said.
Backhouse peered in.
‘Does that look normal to you?’
Backhouse's eyes narrowed, moments before he shook his head. ‘Good God, no. No, it does not.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
Sandy McMahon was distracted from their video analysis. Her mobile had just gone off. Answering it, she was told that the Yeltsin Meditsinskiy Tsentr had just rung her office in Brandeis Gertner. Apparently, Remy Sabatino's condition was improving – and Mr Uglov, the consultant in charge, had declared the injured Formula One driver fit enough to be interviewed by the police.
When McMahon passed this on to Straker, he became agitated. ‘We’ve no idea how ready for this she is – no indication of her condition. We have got to speak to her before any interview is held.’
MacMahon agreed.
‘Given the legal stakes and sensitivities, it's imperative she has legal representation there – particularly if the police are as brutal with her as they have been with Tahm. Is Remy really going to be robust enough for all this so soon after such trauma? Sandy, these people aren’t going to interview her – they are going to interrogate her. She’d be hugely vulnerable to intimidation, to being tripped up – to being prompted into saying something incriminating.’
McMahon launched into a rapid round of phone calls and email correspondence with the Ministry of Justice, the British Consulate and the hospital – urgently trying to secure Remy Sabatino's right to legal representation.
After an hour of protracted negotiation, McMahon managed to achieve a result. Once again it needed an intervention by the British consul, personally, directly with the prosecutor general. Talking over the loudspeaker on the phone in the private cabin of the motor home, the consul said: ‘I’m afraid I had to go quite far. I hadn’t meant to, but the intransigence of these institutions on all this is staggering. I made the point emphatically to Gazdanov himself, that the eyes of the world were on this case. I said that any hint of legal nihilism – anything less than a full, clear, equitable process – would have serious international consequences. But that didn’t seem to bother him.’
‘How did you swing it, then?’ asked Straker.
The consul said: ‘In desperation, I’m ashamed to say, I brought up the Magnitsky scandal. That did work, though; it was the only thing to knock him back. That and the likelihood of more UN sanctions.’
‘Magnitsky did it?’ Straker said.
‘It seemed to. Their attitude in this Grand Prix case, though, is unprecedented,’ said the consul. ‘There is a zealotry involved; I’ve never known anything like it. Anyway, you now have permission to go and see Ms Sabatino before the police do. I can only advise you make the most of your time with her, as I wouldn’t want to say how many more chances you’ll get.’
Straker thanked the consul for his efforts.
They disconnected the call. Straker said: ‘Let's go to Remy straight away. We don’t want to miss the chance to debrief her – and to warn her of what's about to happen.’
They headed into central Moscow. The day's overcast light was still unbroken by the blanket of low cloud. It rendered every view sullen and drab. Straker looked out of the window as they made their way west through southern Moscow along the Third Ring Road.
