If You Hate Me, You'll Enjoy This Video
Long-time readers of this site will remember... well, maybe even short-time readers of this site will remember that my race at Laguna Seca this past Saturday ended in tears, so to speak. I now have the video of the crash, which is posted in its entirety below.
There's a bit of NSFW language at the four-minute mark. The crash itself starts at 2:20, if you just want to skip to the good part. I'm including the lap beforehand because for those of you who have never seen Laguna Seca it's a good way to see how the track works. Also, because I'm a narcissist and the lap before the crash is basically a clinic on how to drive cheap-car endurance races, complete with a near-Zanardi-line two-car pass in the Corkscrew, I left it in.
What you're about to see is this: Out of the corkscrew on the second lap, the Bimmer of TBR runs wide and I take advantage to grab the outside line. He doesn't see me so he moves outside and almost hits me. Once he realizes what he's done, he changes his line without scrubbing enough speed to make that line work. This causes him to drop a wheel off the outside of the very fast Turn Nine. (We're all doing about 85mph here, although it's hard to tell.)
The Bimmer hits me twice. The fuel pump snaps in half leaving me unable to move from the racing surface. My vision was so blurry at this point from being shaken around that I thought a trackside photographer was an EMS person. So I start yelling (well, I thought I was yelling) for him to help me out. Meanwhile, people are driving right at my door at full speed, because this particular series is full of dumb-asses who don't watch for caution flags. (There was also some discussion about the fact that the flagging crew used just wasn't throwing cautions early enough).
Realizing that if I sit there long enough I'm going to get hit again, I get out of the car and head for the tires. This is a serious no-no --- in any race series where you can rely on not getting hit if you're in a stopped car. This is not that race series.
Okay, let's roll tape and let the schadenfreude begin:
No wonder my neck still hurts a bit.