There are two possibilities here. One is that the steering column failed at this point. The other is that as the car came off the back side of the hump pointing left, but with the front wheels still pointing straight ahead, the rear suddenly gripped and threw it sharply right. What we could see once we were allowed to inspect the steering column was that it did have a fatigue crack present, so it was going to fail sooner or later. It had fatigued roughly a third of the way around the circumference and the rest had snapped, either in the impact or from the pressure Ayrton exerted while trying
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