'I thought it was going through my visor and straight into my eye'

Pierre Gasly revealed that he was hit in the helmet by a piece of debris on the opening lap of the Russian Grand Prix. The Toro Rosso driver escaped unharmed from the bizarre incident, but soon ran out of luck as brake failure caused his retirement from the race on just the sixth lap.

An inquest was held at Toro Rosso after the Sochi race, with Brendon Hartley also retiring with a similar issue at the same point in the race.

Although short, Gasly's race was action-packed, as he recounted a troubling set of events from his cockpit on the opening lap.

"I think Daniel lost a piece of carbon, which went straight into my visor, so this was really, really scary," Gasly said.

"I thought it was going through and straight into my eye, and finally it touched the visor and then came into the cockpit.

"In Turn 4 I had to take the carbon piece and throw it from the cockpit.

"At the time I had like five tenths of a second to see it flying and just hitting the visor – maybe a winglet that came from somewhere, I think contact with Daniel.

"But it came my way, pointing towards me and straight in my right eye.

"When I saw it coming first I was like, 'it’s going through the visor'. Finally, the visor is really strong, it hit it and fell into the cockpit.

"The speed as well has an effect on the impact. At that time I was coming out of Turn 2, so I wasn’t so fast.

"Maybe the impact with it luckily wasn’t as big as it would have been if I would have been at 300km/h."

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