Heinz and Honda look for extra speed.

“If you want to experience more excitement in you life then try taking an armchair into the middle of the fast lane of you nearest motorway and sit down facing away from the traffic,” he graphically explained. “It’s a great way to tint you hair grey! That will give you an idea of how I felt when the lights went out for the start of the Spanish Grand Prix and I was sitting there with my car in neutral a lot of lights flashing on the dash panel and desperately trying to get my car’s new launch control to launch.

“I guess it was out to lunch,” he joked, ”for I had all systems go until I saw some lights light up on the dashboard a few seconds before the start and the car went into neutral.” The situation was incredibly dangerous however and Heinz-Harald knows he was lucky to escape unscathed. “The rest of the field roared off and I was left crouched down in my car, bracing my head against the headrest and keeping one eye on the mirrors as cars roared past inches away at around 200 kph not knowing or not if one of them was going to drive into the back of me.
“Thankfully they all missed, but then suddenly it felt pretty lonely sitting there all alone in Jordan-Honda watching the dust settle and the world return to normal.”

With the EJ11’s launch control well and truly broken, it was down to the German driver himself to get his car off the grid and back into the race, but the excitement was not yet over as unknown to him he had broken bits of McLaren and Arrows to avoid just down the track. “After what seemed like a lifetime, but was actually only a second or two, I found a gear and floored the throttle leaving blue smoke off my rear wheels as I chased after the fast disappearing pack. There was plenty of debris all over the first corner where cars had touched and by the end of the lap I saw which ones they were as Bernoldi and Coulthard headed for the pits and repairs.”

The ensuing forced pit stops removed two of the cars in front of him. He now had to set about trying to pass others at the back end of the field on a circuit that is notoriously hard to pass. “Hey, I was already up to 20th so I got my head down to catch the cars ahead that were by now already a lot closer. I overtook another four over the next few laps and then went for 16th place as I out-braked the Jaguar of Pedro de la Rosa on lap 6. I was alongside him on the inside going into the left-hand corner but he turned in and squeezed me over the kerb, my left side wheel completely on the grass.

“I was committed and had to keep going and I just hoped that he would pull wide and give me room. Instead, he kept his car in tight and when I came back off the kerb my rear right wheel locked into his front left which launched me into a mid-air pirouette and backwards into the gravel trap with de la Rosa following me off.” All the evidence since has shown that Heinz-Harald was well ahead of the Jaguar and therefore had the right to the corner, but the Jordan driver has magnanimously accepted it as just a racing accident and will now put the incident behind him.

“So that was the end of my race, which had certainly been an interesting one up to that point. It would have been a great challenge to fight my way back up to the points, but because of de la Rosa I didnīt get the chance. He said later that he didn’t see me until I hit him. Maybe we should swap all these electronic driver aids for a good pair of air horns!