your worst crash-pics please! heres mine (well, someone i know)

[adomakin]

a friend of my brother was sharing the driving in this ex Carlos Sainz escort cosworth on this years Gumball 3000. The car was specced to death. 0-100mph in 6.06 secs and god knows what sort of top end. Lee-my bro's friend-(the owner was driving) decided that he would get some mental shots of them passing all the other Gumballers on a particular stretch of road so he quickly undone his harness to get the shots and............................................... .......................... it went bad. Really bad. Really,really bad

heres the aftermath.











Edited for graphic content. -Z-man.

Lee got flung out of the car when it started rolling (they were doing around 130mph when it went skiddy-widdy) he busted two vertibrae in his back and done his leg. he knew he had busted his leg because he remembers the heel of his shoe hitting him in his face! he also tore his nose and cheek away from his face (see dark area under left eye and big tear under nose and on forehead in pic) in a flappy sort of fashion. they put 140 stitches in his face. unbelievably the driver got out fine. The moral of this story? wear your belt, especially if you are doing 130 with two wheels off the side of a moroccan effort of a road!

Andy, UK

[widebody911]

WTF was he doing running without a belt?

Cobra replica that went off @ Thunderhill last fall.

[djmcmath]

Is that the owner standing next to the Cobra? He looks bummed out enough to have been the guy. Wow.

Dan

[adomakin]

that steering wheel looks bent in a sort of 'painfull' way

[widebody911]

No, that's not the owner. The owner was in the hospital for a solid month-and-a-half or so.

[widebody911]

Is that a Cayenne in the upper-right of this pic?

Originally posted by adomakin

[///Mink]

Originally posted by djmcmath
Is that the owner standing next to the Cobra? He looks bummed out enough to have been the guy. Wow.

Dan

Ha! Nope, that's me in the pic (my M3 is right behind). Thom and I wandered up there at the end of a track day to take a look at the carnage. We were there the day after the incident, I believe.

The driver was in really bad shape afterward, as you can imagine.

[strath44]

Didn't L700NY waste a Silver Ferrari in a previous Gumball?

[Overpaid Slacker]

[techweenie]

Ouch!

You can't just post that without an explanation!

[Overpaid Slacker]

Tech -
May 15, 2003. Dark. Raining softly after 3 hours of downpour. Going home. Uphill, with a medium lefthand sweeper at the top; my driveway is just after "turn in" on the outside of the bend.

Carrying about 40 mph up the hill and pull a double-clutch downshift to slow down for the driveway ... except for my right foot slipping off the brake and hitting the gas just as I'm letting the clutch out. This happens at about 3100 rpm, and the afterburners come on (this car was FAAAAST). So Newton takes over and I rocket through the apex of the turn. The car was launched by the sloped curb, hitting a tree 20 feet away from the road about 3 feet up the trunk.

It's technically accurate to say I walked away from the wreck, though I can't tell you how I got out through my side of the car -- that's as far as the door opens. I'd cut my forehead and shin open but otherwise felt fine. Which is to say as "fine" as you can feel after a sudden deceleration incident of that ferocity.

Notwithstanding how "fine" I felt, upon advice and counsel of the shortly-thereafter-arriving EMTs I took a ride to the hospital with them. Good thing.

I was unaware I'd fractured my cervical spine pretty expertly for a first-timer (compression teardrop fracture of C6 for the docs on board). So, long story short, 3 months in a halo and 4 weeks in a hardcollar later I was pronounced 100% "Go forth and breakdance" healed.

What saved my life was the sloped curb, actually. The launch caused the car hit the tree "nose up". The car climbed the tree a bit, diverting some of the force of the impact. You can see from the pix that most of the damage is bumper and under/back just inside the driver's headlight. The hood isn't really damaged that much, considering. Had I hit the tree straight-and-level, I'da been wormfood. The entire driver's side footwell was pressed up against the front of my seat. I don't know how my legs weren't pulped.

My brother is an emergency doctor and his training and teaching is ongoing. He took my films (xray, CAT and MRI), showed them to 20 board-certified neurologists and spine doctors at a recent conference and asked for a diagnosis (he'd given them the basics -- male, 30 yo, car crash, etc.). 16 immediately said "quadriplegic" 3 said "paraplegic" and one said "not enough information to determine, but it's bad news." Turns out that more than 95% of people with this injury are quads; period.

My bro said "Actually, patient "X" is my brother and right now he's on a sailboat racing around Block Island. No neurological deficit. He's still a moron, mind you, but no neurological deficit as a result of the accident." He likes telling that story; especially the last part.

JP

[techweenie]

Wow. Hard to believe you got out the left side of the car. Congrats on the miraculous result!

[}{arlequin]

Were your neighbors watching? That's a vicious accident to have w/in SIGHT of your driveway...

[Overpaid Slacker]

Guys -
I still don't know who called the EMTs -- I was up in the Cuse when it happened, staying at my mom's place (who was out of town). Nobody has approached her to tell her they were the ones who called. She's lived in that house for 26 years...

The really spooky thing is that I had no idea I had a broken neck and the EMTs didn't immobilize me. Had I sneezed, coughed or turned my head too fast ... lights out. When I got to the hospital and they xrayed me (every inch of me) the tech comes out of the booth with a very grave look on her face. She said "I'm not a doctor and I cannot give you medical advice, but if you turn your head you may seriously regret it."

I get back to the ER Bay and I get three different diagnoses in two hours. Then a CAT scan. Two more (and differing) diagnoses. (Upstate Medical Center is a teaching hospital at SU -- and where my bro went to med school). Finally, after the MRI I get a tall, thin Indian doctor (Ghandhi Indian, not Sitting Bull Indian) who comes in, stands behind me and grabs my head -- hard. He says, "I want to ask you a series of questions and you are to answer ONLY by speaking the words 'yes' or 'no'. Do not nod your head, do not shake your head - Yes or No only." He runs through the neuro deficit check and everything seems OK. Then he steps over to the side of the table and says:

Doc: "Let me get this straight. You turn a Porsche into modern art"
Me: "Uh ... yeah"
Doc: "The medics tell me you totalled the car; gruesome."
Me: "Uh ... yeah, pretty much."
Doc: "You then get OUT of the car, God knows how."
Me: "Yeah....?"
Doc: "And you're just blithely walking around your yard when the EMTs show up."
Me: (not liking where this is going) "Yeah."
Doc: You DIDn't want to come to the hospital.
Me: No. I felt OK, really.
Doc: (now featuring a skeptical, "you were so close to Darwin you could smell his aftershave, couldn't you" look) "When they convinced you to come to the hospital you refused to allow them to immobilize your neck.
Me: Waitaminute. I didn't refuse... when I got into the ambulance they asked me if I wanted my neck immobilized and I said it felt fine. They didn't insist. (incidentally, when I responded to the EMT's question, I turned my head about 90 degrees to the left to do so...)
Doc: (more deeply skeptical) Uh Huh... You refused.
Me: OK, doc, whatever.
Doc: I don't want to get too technical on you here, but the medical term for your condition is "moron."

To say I got lucky is an effort in extreme understatement. The eeriest thing of it all is May 15 fifteen years earlier my dad died w/in 50 feet of the tree I hit -- and w/in 20 feet of where my windshield wound up after it flew through the living room bay window.

JP

[JTO]

JP,
I'm just sitting here with my mouth agap.
Unfreakinbelievable.
troy

[thamlin000]

Wow.

Speechless.

[djmcmath]

Ok, I'm impressed. That's just incredible.

[speeder]

Wow, JP.

You'd better do something incredible w/ your life now!

Only since you mentioned it, how did your Dad die? He must have been young.

[Overpaid Slacker]

Thanks, guys. It means a lot. It's cathartic to write about this, especially to an audience such as this one.

A moment of humor in the whole thing: the windshield landed on the living room floor completely in tact -- not a crack. The rearview mirror was still attached. The paramedics were "holy *****ting" and taking pictures of the windshield. Nobody could believe it. Syracuse is not a huge town, and not much goes on there most nights... so my car, still wrapped around the tree was on the early morning news. I got a bunch of calls on my cell phone in the hospital (!) from buddies offering to go over to mom's place and clean up the mess in the house (there was blood everywhere inside, too b/c I'd gone in to call my bro and let him know what happened). A Bieffe helmet I had in the car -- in its case -- was shattered. I didn't find that out until this spring when I grabbed it to bring it down to LI for autoX/drivers' ed.

The worst part of the whole thing was lying in the hospital bed the next morning (still in a collar, they didn't put the halo on until the following morning) and seeing the look on mom's face when she walked in the room. And she's hard as nails. Trust me, you never want to make your mom look/feel like that.

I felt (and feel) very stupid about the whole thing. I was always telling people about the respect with which you had to treat this car -- "treat the gas pedal like it's the trigger of a gun" to use Cramer's phrase. All I needed to do is brake (917 brakes will stop the rotation of the Earth) but I threw in a gratuitous double-clutch downshift flourish on wet roads, wearing shoes that were evidently wet. One mistake is all it took and it bit me -- hard.

Denis - Dad died of cancer at 52. Mom's been a nurse since they were using leeches, so when he was beyond all hope they set up a hospital bed and equip in the dining room (which is off the living room). I consider myself very fortunate to have made it home from school in time to say goodbye in his last few moments of lucidity and hold his hand exactly 24 hours after I got home when he died. He was certainly holding my hand 15 years later.

I'm working on the exceptional thing. I've just got to decide what I want to do when I grow up. Every morning I look in the mirror and see the two small scars on my forehead where the halo was screwed into my head with titanium pins -- a reminder that I'm on borrowed time and should do something with it.

Hey, this is my thousandth post!

JP

[Icemaster]

HS.

And you still walk. And talk. And everything else I assume...

That's truly amazing.