Coulthard recalls Spa crash that broke his leg and left him in tears on the grass

David Coulthard has opened up about a harrowing crash at Spa-Francorchamps that ended his race in the Formula Opel Lotus Euroseries with a broken right leg, recounting the moment he sat on the grass in tears as the field streamed past him at the end of lap one.

Speaking on the Up To Speed podcast, the 13-time grand prix winner was asked whether the iconic Eau Rouge and Raidillon combination was a straightforward flat-out corner during his racing years. Coulthard was unequivocal: it was not. “We didn’t have the tarmac run-off at the top of the hill on the left-hand side,” he explained. “So we had the sort of threading the eye of the tarmac needle, and then if you did make a mistake and go beyond the kerb, you were in gravel or grass, which led to what would be a big accident. It’s a circuit where you absolutely have to respect the corner, and it’s a high-speed roller coaster.”

Coulthard traced the root cause of his accident to the soft suspension characteristics of junior-formula machinery. The immense compression at the bottom of the Eau Rouge dip caused the chassis to scrape the ground, stripping aerodynamic load from the tyres at the worst possible moment.

“I got spun around on the first lap by Kenny Brack,” he recalled. “I hit the barrier on the left-hand side, came back in front of the pack and another car T-boned me right on the side of the chassis, which compressed the aluminium, and I broke my right leg.”

The Scotsman described the aftermath with vivid clarity. As the field completed lap one, Coulthard was already out of the car and lying on the grass. “I remember Gil de Ferran giving me a thumbs up to check if I was OK. And I remember just bursting into tears because I knew I had broken my leg.”

Because the Formula Opel Lotus Euroseries was running as an F1 support race, Coulthard was treated at the circuit’s medical centre under the supervision of Professor Sid Watkins, the legendary FIA medical delegate. The moment took an unexpectedly domestic turn when marshals cut away his race suit to reveal a pair of holey lucky underpants — and his mother, who had been brought into the medical room, made her feelings about his choice of underwear perfectly clear.

Coulthard also used the conversation to contrast the experience of driving Spa in the 1990s with the grip levels available to modern F1 cars, noting that advances in aerodynamics and tyre technology have transformed what was once a genuinely treacherous sequence into something far more manageable for today’s drivers.