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Spectacular Crash at Macau

There were some tense moments in Macau for the third round of the Asian Trophy after a truly massive accident involving Finn Seppo Kankkunen and Canada's Monty Semprini brought out a lengthy caution period. Semprini seemed to catch the worst of it as he remained pinned under his upside-down car for over fifteen minutes as track workers attempted to extricate him from the wreckage. Eventually Monty did escape unhurt from what he described as, "by far the nastiest shunt I've ever had. Bad karma."

"I had my foot caught in the pedals and they didn't want to flip the car over until I got untangled," Semprini explained the delay. "I was fine but they took me to the hospital for observation, but there were a couple of hot nurses there so I had to fake some sort of injury," he winked.

Indeed, after finally crawling out from under his car, the affable Canadian waved to the cheering crowd as he walked to the ambulance, the only mark on him being a large scrape on the side of his distinct lipstick-marked aqua blue helmet where his head met the tarmac. Kankkunen was also unhurt.

The Macau street circuit, notorious for its incidents and difficulty, served up another tedious weekend full of safety cars. After the heavy rain of qualifying and a damp but drying sprint race that produced thirteen retirements and only eight green flag laps, Semprini's and Kankkunen's high speed clash brought out the third full course yellow of the day's feature race. Eager to make up positions after an early pitstop Semprini made his move on the Finn on lap 18 on the long straight between turns 1 and 2, however Kankkunen, not seeing him, moved inside to protect his line and the two collided. Semprini's white Ray-Ban Lola ran up the sidepod of Kankunnen's spinning car and launched itself up into the catch fence. Semprini's car had its entire front end ripped off in the fence before flipping in mid air, landing inverted and sliding to a rest against the barriers on the exit of Mandarin Bend.

It was a scary situation with the pilot unseen beneath the car, the crowd fell silent as the field filed slowly past behind the safety car, picking its way through the scattered debris for six laps. Rescue crews huddled around the car for fifteen minutes and with no sign of fire took great care to get the driver out. To complicate matters Monty's radio quit working and could not message anyone that he was all right. When they finally began to tip the car upwards, Semprini crawled out, and dusted himself off to a much relieved standing ovation. The popular Canadian then took a bow and patted several track workers on the back in gratitude.

"I knew my helmet was scraping on the road because it sure was loud, but I barely felt a thing. Damn good helmet," said Semprini. "Thanks to all the track workers for helping me out. We can't race without them."

Germany's Donald O'Brien was handed victory when leader Andrea Cannas made a late stop for a splash of fuel. It was a race of attrition as only fifteen cars managed to take the checquered flag. Cannas still leads the Asian Trophy standings on 86 points to Jindřich Hrneček's 44 and Nikolaus Lauter's 43.