After two unexplained accidents that saw its suffer a double DNF for the first time this season, Williams has revealed that it is to launch an investigation.

The first of four Safety Car periods during the race occurred when Nico Hulkenberg inexplicably crashed on the opening lap. Having encountered a problem with his clutch on the parade lap the German dropped to the back of the grid for the start. However, going through the tunnel, the FW32 veered to the left and went into the wall.

"I'm not entirely sure what happened," said the German. "The car felt odd one minute and the next I was in the wall."

Later in the race, teammate Rubens Barrichello suffered an equally mystifying accident, this time going up the hill into Casino Square.

"I had such a good start but the car started to feel really strange after the pitstop," said the Brazilian. "The steering wheel, in particular, didn't feel normal. The problem continued to get worse and then I crashed."

"Nico had a problem with the clutch paddle on the steering wheel during the formation lap," admitted technical director, Sam Michael. "He then had a failure with the front wing mounting on the first lap of the race. Rubens had a fantastic start and was running in sixth when he started to experience poor handling after his stop. 11 laps after his pitstop, he had a failure at the rear end of his car.

"We need to get all the parts back to the factory in order to identify correctly what components on both cars caused the failures," he added. "We have quite a bit of car damage to repair, but we're making progress with performance.

"That was not a good day for the team," he admitted.