Romain Grosjean: 28 seconds to hell!

Twenty-eight seconds on the surface represent nothing, but sometimes they can be worth a lifetime.
The season was now drawing to a close and the gold rush was over, nothing more was up for grabs.

The cars, after the first few meters, fan out on the wide straight leading to the braking of Turn 4; however, a Hass follows a strange trajectory, goes off the track and crashes into the guardrail, turning into a fireball: a lethal vice in which Romain Grosjean remains stuck.

Time suddenly seems to stop and with it the hearts of all, petrified in front of the screens, motionless, like Romain: trapped between the sheets of his car broken in half.

He seems to surrender to his own inexorable fate; he feels himself slowly dying inside as his whole life passes before his eyes. Dying in the flames, under the eyes of his own children, was something he would never forgive himself; so he finds the strength to fight back, he divides himself and with a sly movement manages to unbuckle his belts, tries to get out but his shoulders are blocked.

Force on his legs and in his momentum his left shoe comes off, but from the cloud of black smoke we finally catch a glimpse of Romain’s body.

He rises over the sheets of metal and grabs the hand of Alan van der Merwe, driver of the medical car, and with a leap finally emerges from the hell he was trapped in for twenty-eight seconds.

Shocked, frightened, incredulous. He is in shock but alive.

The following Sunday he walked through the gates of the paddock accompanied by his wife Marion and with his hands still bandaged, he re-embraced his men, thanked the rescuers and indulged in a few interviews in which he recounted his own experience, his last in Formula One.

Three years have passed since that terrifying incident and those twenty-eight seconds, eternal.

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