I went back and watched the onboard from Lewis for the first couple of laps, and it was pretty crazy, much more so than it looked like from the world feed. Charles' car was dropping bits of carbon fibre all over the place, and there was an active back and forth between Lewis and Bonno, with warnings about flying debris. One of the front elements on Lewis' car was broken off right after the initial collision. Going down the start/finish straight at the start of lap 2, Lewis moved out of the slipstream because it was just too dangerous; hard to see what was happening but there was a stream of sparks coming from the left side, and presumably some fragments of carbon. There was a message from Lewis that sounded like "this is dangerous as f***", but it was a bit indistinct.

Then the endplate finally came off going up the hill to 130R, and it was pretty scary; it just hit and sheared the wing mirror clean off. It didn't just damage it and it fell off later, just *bam* and it was gone. I couldn't even freeze frame it in the video replay.


The FIA might be taking a look at their procedures here. Apparently they "expected" Charles to come in at the end of lap 1, and when he didn't, asked what was going on. Ferrari said that he was coming in at the end of lap 2, but after the endplate came off they decided that was unnecessary, prompting the FIA to go back to them again and actually demand that he come in.

Really should have been an immediate meatball. After seeing the damage inflicted by the endplate, I'm fairly confident we'll see new procedures sooner rather than later.