Pierre Gasly only had a short-lived Russian Grand Prix but left Sochi relieved to still have his health after two scary moments.

The Frenchman eventually retired after a brake failure approaching Turn 2 but thankfully a spin along with some braking capacity at the rear were enough to slow him from around 180mph to a standstill before hitting anything.

What wasn't known until now, however, is that on Lap 1 a piece of debris from Daniel Ricciardo's car had struck the Toro Rosso driver on the helmet.

"I think Daniel lost a piece of carbon that went straight into my visor – this was really, really scary because I thought it was going through and straight in my eye," Gasly said.

"But it hit my visor and fell in the cockpit, so in Turn 4 I had to take the carbon piece and throw it from the cockpit.

"At the time I had like half a second to see it flying and hitting the visor. When I saw it coming I thought ‘F**k it’s going through the visor’ but the visor is really strong because it just hit it and fell into the cockpit."

For many, this will bring back memories of Felipe Massa's freak accident during qualifying in Hungary in 2009 when a spring hit his helmet causing head injuries which he would recover from.

What this does prove, however, is the Halo cockpit device, which was praised after the crash involving Charles Leclerc and Fernando Alonso in Spa, isn't a complete solution with the debris in this case passing under the structure.

As for his later brake problem, the 2019 Red Bull driver added: "From the start, it felt like the brake pedal was quite strange and I had a strange feeling with it.

"A really long pedal. It got worse in the first two laps and then the pedal went completely flat and I lost the front brakes. We had to retire."