London: French police officials said on Wednesday that speed was “not an important element” of their investigation into the December 29, 2013, skiing accident in which Michael Schumacher, the most successful driver in the history of Formula One racing, sustained serious head injuries.

At a news conference in the regional centre of Albertville, investigators said that they had been unable to determine Schumacher’s speed at the time of the accident from a preliminary review of video footage recorded by the camera attached to Schumacher’s helmet. They said it would take further work, examining the two-minute video passage “image by image” to identify the speed at which Schumacher was travelling.

But Patrick Quincy, a prosecutor in the Albertville office, said the video appeared to show “completely normal behaviour by a good skier on this terrain.”

The finding appeared to lend an important context to the accident, in which Schumacher fell and struck his head on a rock protruding from an off-piste snowfield at the resort of Meribel in the French Alps.

The term refers to an area of snow, generally more challenging and hazardous for skiers than the pistes, or runs, that are groomed by specially equipped vehicles that prepare the hillsides at major resorts.

The Albertville investigators said that they had called the news conference in the hope of stopping the spread of “false information” about the Schumacher accident.

This appeared to be a reference to news reports that had suggested that Schumacher, renowned for his speed in the years when he won 91 grand prix races and seven F1 world drivers’ championships, might have been behaving recklessly in venturing into the off-piste snowfield.

The investigators said they had visited the accident scene, interviewed witnesses, inspected Schumacher’s skis and his shattered helmet, and met with his doctors at Grenoble. They said his skis had been “in perfect condition,” and that the off-piste area, between two of Meribel’s main ski runs, had been well marked.

They also said the helmet video had shown Schumacher to have been about 8 metres into the off-piste area when his right ski struck “a rock that was sticking out,” and that this had pitched him forward, head-first, into a collision with another rock that was about 3 metres farther down the slope.

Officials at Meribel have said that there was about 50 centimetres of fresh powder snow in the off-piste area at the time.

Schumacher has remained in an artificially-induced coma since arriving at the Grenoble University Hospital Centre shortly after his accident. In their most recent bulletin on his condition on Monday, Schumacher’s medical team described his condition as stable, but emphasised that they “continue to consider Michael’s condition as critical”.

Coupled with other statements by Schumacher’s family and his manager, the medical bulletin suggested that those most directly involved expect the vigil at Grenoble, after 11 days, to continue for some time — and that they still know too little about the extent of Schumacher’s injuries to give any authoritative statement on his prospects for recovery.

“The privacy of the patient demands that we are not going into details of his treatment, and this is why we do not envisage any press conferences or statements in the near future,” the medical team said.

— New York Times News Service