It could save you II (Autotopia 64 Merc Comet Crash)

DVW posted a thread about inspecting your race car - it could save you.. Check this video out. Good analogy in hindsight....

Autotopia Crash

The throttle's sticking
I'm having to ride the brakes

They were sort of given two warnings but chose to ignore them.

This is scary. I've been in similar situation.

He should have turn the ignition off right away, too bad he didn't
I had a similar experience years ago when I forgot to reattach a spark plug wire holder on my old max wedge car(1963 Plymouth Belvedere sedan) driver side carb and it ended up getting stuck under the throttle linkage making the motor stay at around 3500 RPM in low gear after showing off driving into the yard at work, I went through chain link fence and scratched up some of the trim around the windshield and broke off the "426" emblem off the hood
I got lucky that it didn't do any other damage to the car or me or at work

Jamming it in reverse would have made for a violent and messy slow down but likely would have helped substantially. Easy to say from the ouch.

Looking at the video again i don't know that I could get one of those junk shifters in reverse during a stressful moment, I hate those things!

The brakes would have been fine if the throttle sticking issue would have been fixed.

Those look like the Dynalite's I have on my drag car from way back in the day. Nice and light but don't try to stop in a hurry.They were never intended for street use with those rotors IIRC.

Watching him face plant the metal dash brought back bad memories for me when I was a kid, was riding in a 70s Dodge van and the driver wasn't paying attention, rearended someone and my friend face planted the steel dash....Knocked out all his front teeth on the top and bottom. Wasn't pretty.

Hi Performance car

Low performance driver

Bad outcome.

Just click the thing OFF. Instead of grabbing the shifter, hit the kill/key/whatever to shut it down.

This kind of thing is not that uncommon. He had a TV show there to film his new car, he didn't want to stop and ask them for time to fix the car. I've seen guys get out on the racetrack with obvious and dangerous problems because they didn't want to miss that round. Or guys get in a car to drive to work because they don't want to be late or miss a day and they know the car is unsafe and don't have time to fix it right now.
Several years back there was a farmer around here hauling a load of silage in an old 2-ton flatbed. He plowed through a red light and wiped out a family. There were a half a dozen empty cans of brake fluid in the cab. He had been trying to pour it into the master cylinder under the floor every time he needed brakes because it was leaking out so fast.

It's all the same line of thinking. I'll be okay this one time, I'll fix it after. Similar to people getting hurt at work. Most of the time they say"I knew I shouldn't have done that".

There are so many things in life that we do that can't be undone. We need to do a good job of thinking ahead of what the consequences could be of careless behavior.

I had something similar happen where the damn wire harness for the lean burn somehow made its way to jamb the throttle open. I turned the ignition off immediately after realizing the brakes were not going to stop the car. It was an interesting few seconds navigating a twisting winding mountain road to say the least.

A comedy of errors with an inevitable conclusion. Dont know anything about the guy or shop he represents narrating the video but the fact he knew about a sticking throttle and still agreed to the shoot/drive says volumes to me.

His "Won't go to the track because he might wreck it" did not age well.

Good thing they had those nice belts on.

Car gave them plenty of warning signs that they just ignore. Can't fix stupid.

I didn't bother watching the whole sh!t-show... saw & heard enough before seeing it all play out in agonizing detail

as i always like to say, "it ain't the speed that does you in, it's the sudden stop that does it every time !"

that's it !

I saw a guy in a better get loose around 80’ out and he got out, then nailed the gas again. I thought it looked like a bad deal right then for some reason, just struck me funny how it looked. The throttle hung open and it being a pro level like blower car, it ran out the back end of the eight full blast and was doing at least 175 when it plowed the oak tress well beyond the shut off.

Every one of us in my group that day thought shutting it down was the most obvious thing to do, but not being in the heat of the moment I don’t know if it would’ve occurred to do that. I think you have to have that in your mind as a reflex when you strap in or you will end up with a helicopter ride or worse.

The ihra pro stock driver I knew personally was with us that day. He said he never got back in when a run went to crap like that. His family ran the car themselves and as more of a hobby, it wasn’t worth it to push things to the absolute edge.

Cliff notes? Pushrod fell out? Brakes just didn't work right? Billy Bob designed the system? Couldn't get it bled? Looked like a lawn sprinkler when he pushed the pedal?

Oh my. I have had a few run away muscle cars over the years and two things need to happen - 1) click it off! and 2) put it in f'ing neutral man! Not a whole lot of self preservation going on with either of those gentlemen.

Always wear your safety belt!!! The passenger was probably picking red PPG chips out of his teeth after that.


I find it funny that they say it was a brake problem when the car was clearly under power. Is the driver an experienced racer?

I wondered about that too, but I haven't seen a definitive explanation. He did a follow-up video where he took questions from the audience, and he talked about it maybe being the brakes being over heated (from riding them) and boiling the brake fluid.

When I watched the crash video, it seems like the driver has his foot go to the floor when he's hitting the brakes.. not just unresponsive brakes that took more effort that usual. I think that's why the boiling brake fluid explanation makes sense to me.

We had a (former) friend that was doing burnouts on the pad in front of his garage. The kickdown rod over-centered and stuck the throttle wide open.

He rode the brakes all the way into the first bay of the garage and halfway into the second bay before hitting his two post lift!

Brakes were useless with skinny tires up front and the engine pulling at full throttle.

Mayday! De-energize the ignition captain!

First thing I said when a friend sent this video!

He did something with the shifter. Neutral?

He should have put in neutral as soon as he knew he couldn't stop it, let the motor rev until you can shut the ignition or fuel pump off

I was thinking since they could smell the brakes and he was riding them (stupid) they overheated, fluid boiled, pedal hit the floor and the rest is history.

Just a guess and could be wrong but is possible.

That face plant into the dash must have hurt. Feel sorry for the passenger.

I think it was a race type shifter and he was having trouble operating it in panic mode. I'm not sure if ever got it shifted since some of those shifters need to have a gate lifted to move forwards. Neither guy thought of turning off the ignition. It sounds like they knew the throttle was stuck and had been riding the brakes but evidently neither guy thought about the next steps to take such as turn the ignition off, pull over, shift into neutral, shift into reverse, etc. Since they had not thought it out before then when panic hit they couldn't think so they just drove it into the back of a stopped car. The car might have had an emergency brake but neither guy said anything about it or tried to apply it. The driver panicked and drove it into a stopped car.

He stuck it in park and it broke the park sprague, you can hear it buzzing away.

Why no master cutoff?

Hit neutral and let it bounce off the limiter or blow.

Mention of the funny/complex shifter.... I know first hand a pro built 727 slammed into reverse at 50 mph will stall the motor and the wheel hop will help brake the car.

Yes he should have dropped it into low and killed the ignition but the result would have been the same. It wouldn't have mattered what kind of downshifting, ignition killing, neutral or reverse engaging he would have done. In the short time and distance from when he realized that the brakes were not going to work by pumping them and he realized that the left turn lane became blocked, until the time they crashed, he might have been able to scrub off 1 or 2 miles an hour. The crash was inevitable at that point. The whole key was that he should not have been riding the brakes to control the speed when the throttle was stuck. Especially after they smelt the brakes burning. He should have pulled over and got the throttle fixed. Or he should have popped it into neutral occasionally as they were trying to limp back to the shop to control the speed. I listened to the analysis and q and a session of it by them on YouTube on my way home from work. I had to turn YouTube up to 1.5 times speed to make it tolerable. But anyway one thing I found out about that guy from the passenger seat, who I've never heard of before, he knows little to anything about cars, at least about how they work. I think he said he's only been a car guy for about a year. If most any of us would have been in that passenger seat we would have figured out what the driver was doing. And we would have put a stop to it.

The shifter looked like an old B&M Star Shifter.

Let just say that was a difficult shifter to get anything done quickly.

I truly enjoyed the driver bracing himself and turning his head. Unbelievable stupidty on full display.

Driver is still an idiot.

When I first started driving I remember 3 things that my parents told us when learning. One was don't assume anyone is going to follow what the turn signal was indicating. Second, when turning left across lanes of traffic, keep the wheels straight until you start to make the turn in case you get tagged from behind... don't want to end up in opposite direction of traffic lanes. Third, the sudden test of THE THROTTLE IS STUCK OPEN!!! what do you do??? click it off. Had a few times the parents let you have it with that line, but it sticks with you. What's the old saying, practice makes perfect. Same as pilot simulations. That yelling the throttle was stuck saved my rear twice, once when my 70 6 pack GTX stuck wide open. Calmly clicked it off.

I have thought of installing a solenoid in the electrical system main cable , with a big red panic button, or a morse cable that would go from drivers area to the master cutoff switch. There is a huge safety advantage in being able to shut down the electrical system from the drivers seat . The other advantage is i would never have to unbuckle to turn on power when i forget to do so before getting in the car. That and making sure ALL circuits are properly fuzzed. If the button or lever are right in the shifter area, power could even be cut before impact, if the driver is quick. That would greatly reduce the chance of fire, or run away due to a stuck throttle. I had a throttle partially stick open in the traps once. Luckily i was at BIR in Minnesota, which has a very long shutdown, being a part of a large road race course.

Sad to see such a beautiful car destroyed and hope everyone involved has fully recovered. Why weren't these guys wearing seat belts? Driver inexperience played a role in the severity that crash, some lessons are hard learned.

Having experienced brake failure on a couple occasions is why I used Wilwood's rear disk kit with the internal parking brake.

Hee!! Hee!! Remember those pictures

My throttle stuck on the big end at Cecil County one pass... good thing that place has a long shutdown. I did remember to turn off the ignition when I figured it it wasn't slowing down, but still pulled over to the side with a big look on my face.

Turned out the rubber gasket between the fresh air plate and the carb had worked its way out somehow and got sucked down into the carb. Had that happened on the street, it could have been a very different outcome.

Regardless, I still can't say anything about the subject in the video w/o coming across like a snarky a-hole.