the mercedes clr incident at le mans is one of the only racing crashes i feel comfortable laughing at because a) nobody was seriously injured and b) it is a little funny that mercedes watched their car do That and were like "okay. uh. you know what we're just never doing le mans ever again"
mercedes watching their car do this: huh. maybe we're not good at endurance racing.
my tags were correct, it did in fact do it twice
for anyone wondering why this happened the short answer is that the driver was using a racing technique called drafting where you drive directly behind a car. the car pushes air around you and creates a slipstream enabling you to go faster. unfortunately this also gets rid of your front downforce which doesn't usually result in the car doing THAT, but the way the CLR's body was constructed, with its dramatic overhangs and short wheelbase, made it very unstable and extremely sensitive to aerodynamic changes
The absolutely WILD thing about this accident was it was the third time it had happened in this one single race!
At Le Mans teams enter 3 identical cars, and Mercedes had entered 3 CLRs, CLR 4 CLR 5 & CLR 6.
CLR 4 was being driven by Australian driver Mark Webber in practice two days before the race when he had the incident in the photo and flipped the car onto its roof on the track. Mercedes repaired CLR 4 and were ready for the pre-race warm-up, again driven by Webber, and on that warm up lap Webber again flipped the car and CLR 4 was pulled from the race. Both times Webber sustained absolutely minimal bruising injuries from his seatbelt and walked away from both crashes.
As far as Mercedes could see from the telemetry, this was a CLR 4 problem or a Webber problem, as CLR 5 and CLR 6 had both completed practice and qualification without incident and they were starting in 5th and 7th place respectively. So they went ahead with running those two.
4 hours into the race, CLR 5 has the accident in the clip above, getting tossed off the track, into the trees, where a branch narrowly avoids both impailing the Scottish driver Peter Dumbreck and also avoids piercing the fuel tank and blowing the car up. Dumbreck is briefly knocked unconscious but gets it together quickly enough that by the time help arrives he's got himself out of the car and is sitting on the grass next to it. He is also cleared with only minor injuries.
The CLR 6 is immediately pulled from the race and Mercedes never enters Le Mans again.
Also because of the pure bad luck of his being the 3rd accident, it being so goddamn Looney Tunes with basically no injuries, and the normative determinism of his name, in some racing circles this is known as Dumbreck's Dumb Wreck.
