McLaren asked DC to park

Coulthard was amazingly laissez-faire about his contact with Klien, explaining: "On the face of it he moved over on me but the reality is that he had lost his left-hand mirror. He just let the car drift out of Eau Rouge and I had already committed to the slipstream. It was his tyre on my front wing. It whipped the front wing off, which broke my aerial and actually just missed my head, cut the carbon camera mount clean in two and then went up onto my rear wing.

"The team was nervous about whether I was going to drop debris so they asked me to park the car as soon as possible. But I didn't want to have to walk back from up there! There's forests, hairy marshals and goodness knows what... I knew that if I got to the bottom of the hill I could blag my way back to the pits. And then the Safety Car came out because of my debris, which was perfect."

Coulthard was brave to go back out.

"I came in, changed the wing, went back out and unfortunately the pods were full of grass because at 190mph for 100m on the grass you pick up more rubbish than a Flymo. When I came in for the stop, they took the front wing out of my rear wing and I could see a big chip out of it. I thought, Oh ****, because these things have a tendency to collapse...

"The engine temperature had gone right up and so for the last few laps I'm going through Blanchimont with steam coming into the cockpit and thinking, I'm either going to blow the engine and put water on the rear axle or the rear wing is going to collapse. Whether it happened at 190mph or 200mph it was going to hurt, so I just kept pressing on, although I was short-shifting for the last couple of laps to look after the temperature once I'd passed Panis."

He and the team were rewarded with two points, which moved McLaren to within five points of BMW Williams's fourth place in the constructors' championship.