Top moments of 2012, #12: The crash world championship - video
This year’s Formula One season saw a lot of crashes including the very dramatic start ones that saw cars get airborne. Obviously, they are one of the Motorsport.com top moments - number 12 out of 20.
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The Formula One season of 2012, fortunately, ended without any driver wounded. Now we can present the results of our 2012 F1 Crash World Championship without it sounding like a kind of black humor.
The scoring of the tournament awards points to the driver who hits another car knocking it out of the race. It does not matter whether the driver was at fault or not.
Following this criterion, we have a champion in Romain Grosjean with 5 confirmed points obtained in 3 different races, despite also being involved in other incidents of minor relevance. If we consider only the crashes caused by him at the Belgian Grand Prix, he obtained 3 points at once.
Grosjean also obtained an honorable mention in that same race, because hitting the Ferrari of Fernando Alonso; he changed the outcome of the entire driver championship. In that race, Alonso scored no championship points and Sebastian Vettel came second, scoring 18 points. Vettel won the championship by only 3 points over Alonso. McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton could also argue that he saw his chances to fight for the world championship until the last race go away in the same incident.
Because of the severity of multiple accidents Grosjean was "honored" by the FIA with the banishment of a race, a punishment last applied against Michael Schumacher in 1994.
Grosjean won the 2012 F1 Crash Championship getting his points hitting and removing from race Maldonado, Kobayashi, Hamilton, Alonso and Webber.
As runner-up, we have the controversial Pastor Maldonado also with 5 points (Grosjean, De La Rosa, Hamilton, Perez and Glock) in 5 different runs. Just as Grosjean, Maldonado ends another season with
several incidents, maintaining his reputation for causing accidents that follows him from other lower series and seasons.
The tiebreaker in favor of Grosjean was obtained due to the impact of the accidents caused by him; his race banishment and the fact that Maldonado won one race, the GP of Spain, and despite Grosjean having finished the regular driver championship this year in eighth position with 96 points. Maldonado only managed fifteenth with 45 points.
Curiously this year, we have the champion and runner-up colliding in the first race of the season, the Australian GP, with both dropping out of the race. So, in this GP, each scored a point, a harbinger of the fierce competition that would follow throughout all F1 season of 2012.
In honor of his already established career as Crash Boy, Grosjean, our champion of 2012, we bring in a video with the best moments of his "successful" crash career.
Next: moment #11 and Previous: moment #13
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