Hulkenberg narrowly avoids Bortoleto in 'slow motion' near-miss at Dutch Grand Prix

Nico Hulkenberg escaped a potentially race-ending collision with Audi team-mate Gabriel Bortoleto at the Dutch Grand Prix in Zandvoort, describing the incident as something he watched unfold “almost in slow motion” before threading his car through a gap he estimated at the width of a sheet of paper.

The near-miss was triggered by Max Verstappen’s heavy crash at the end of lap one in the circuit’s final banked corner, which remained damp from a pre-race shower despite the rest of the track being dry enough for slick tyres. Bortoleto, reacting to the incident ahead, spun 360 degrees and came to a halt in the middle of the circuit, leaving oncoming drivers with almost no time to react.

Hulkenberg managed to swerve around the left-hand side of the stationary Audi, but only just. “It was scary, sketchy,” the German said. “The whole track was very dry, just that corner stayed much wetter and caught people out. It was very tricky and I wasn’t sure where he was going to go, if he was going to roll up or roll down. I was waiting, hesitating until the last moment. A good portion of luck not to hit each other there, but that was too close for comfort.”

From the pitwall, Audi racing director and three-time Le Mans winner Allan McNish admitted he only grasped the full severity of the moment on replay. “When I first saw Gabriel spinning and then Nico coming out the other side of it, I didn’t quite realise that he had gone into the smoke,” McNish said. “So, it was a bit too much Days of Thunder for my heart.”

McNish, drawing on his own racing experience, credited both instinct and skill for keeping the incident from turning catastrophic. “When something’s happening ahead of you, there is a mental process, but there’s also an instinct,” he said. “And then after that, there’s an element of instinct to judgement. How far do you go? In which direction? A banking is a different thing, which is why I was very impressed with what Gabi was able to do to keep it in the middle of the circuit and for it not to spoon up into the wall. Whether it was instinct or skill and focus or anything else, I don’t know. But it was a bloody good save.”

Hulkenberg recovered from the drama to finish eighth and collect four championship points, continuing what has been a consistent run of scoring results for the Audi outfit.