There have been some stunning incidents this week, ranging from the hilarious video of a Formula 1 marshall rolling under Luizzi’s car in Malaysia, to this horrifying footage of a race car completely clearing the concrete barrier at Brands Hatch, UK. We’ve got a second video of that horror smash, in which both drivers walked away, as well as a few you might have missed, including Jason Plato’s high speed bender in the British Touring Car Championships.
Let’s start with that second angle from Brands Hatch. The accident occurred at an amateur one-make Toyota MR2 race at the infamous Brands Hatch circuit in the UK. The event was not televised so this spectator captured the only footage of the incident. Cars 1 and 55 come together, and the black MR2 gets squeezed over the barrier and into the parking lot, while the red MR2 does a spectacular series of end-to-end rotations against the catch fence. There’s an awesome stop-frame in this footage as well.
The next video features Jason Plato, a presenter on Discovery Channel’s Fifth Gear and BTCC Champion. The track is ex-F1 circuit Donington Park, also in the UK. Plato gets a nudge from behind just after the race starts and goes off during a flat-out corner. The commentator says that cars never go off their, so its a long slippery ride to the barriers. Incredibly the team rebuild the car in just a few hours, and had it on the grid for the next race, which brought Plato to tears. He said “Forget F1, this is the best team in the world.” The big girl. Plato eventually placed 6th and earned some valuable points.
In Nascar this week we saw Restrictor Plate racing at Talladega, one of the highlights of the calendar. If you’ve ever watched Nascar you might know that it involves going left and crashing. And weird sponsorship. That aside, Talladega is a rare 2.5 mile super-speedway, which means the drivers can literally drive flat-out for all 188 laps. To slow them down, a plate is welded below the accelerator (can you imagine that in F1) which holds them at about 180mph. To gain a speed advantage, rival drivers “bumpdraft” – they literally touch bumpers to cancel air resistance for the trailing car. This is incredible motor racing, but also incredibly dangerous, can you imagine somebody nudges you a little too hard at 300kmh? Well it happens, and this is the result:
And finally, during Friday free practice at the Malaysian Grand Prix, an in-car camera caught a hilarious moment when track marshals were pushing Antonio Luizzi’s broken-down car off of the track. Luizzi was out of the car when the incident happened. We’re only laughing because the marshal involved got up straight away. Sorry about the lame dubbed music, I searched Youtube long and hard for original audio but no luck.
