Watch All Hell Break Loose at the Monaco Historics Race
Track workers drop an F1 car three stories from a crane onto the track. Chaos ensues.
The Grand Prix de Monaco Historique is a treat. This biannual event is slotted in before the Formula 1 race weekend, and it hosts an incredible array of vintage metal. The entrants are grouped by era, seven different classes spanning prewar to bellbottoms. The final heat in this year’s event featured 1973-1976 F1 Grand Prix cars. Things did not go well.
Fair warning: You’re going to see a McLaren M23 get dropped from a crane. It happens about 30 seconds into the video, while the grid’s under full caution, and you can hear the car hit the ground. It’s gross, as is watching the poor safety marshals fly into a panic. Normally, a half-million-dollar F1 car plummeting three stories onto concrete would take the calamity cake. But, as we find out soon after, nothing that’s happening even approaches normal.
What we have here is a failure to communicate. Oblivious to the crane incident, the safety car pulls into the pits, and the grid takes off. They’re racing towards the track workers, who are scrambling to clean up the McLaren mess a few corners ahead. The safety car, a Renault Megane, realizes this, and tries speeding through pit lane to jump in front of the pack. It doesn’t work. So now there’s yellow French hatchback dicing with a field of vintage F1 cars through the streets of Monte Carlo, frantically trying to stop traffic. And that’s when shit really starts hitting the fan...
