What is Digg?102 Comments
- jet3004, on 10/12/2007, -4/+52Rule #1: If you have to beg someone to "help you find" a car you want to buy, you most likely should not be driving said car.
- KyleRayner, on 10/12/2007, -3/+48Moron hotdogging a machine he couldnt handle. People should be required to take a course before purchasing a high-powered sports car.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+43And soccer moms should have to have a classified license to drive 2 ton SUVs while talking on their cell phones too!!
- lalusr, on 10/12/2007, -3/+30there is no way his car flipped over going 30-40 and judging by the trail the car left he must have been going a lot faster
- darksheer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+27My thoughts exactly. Rolling a car that sits 2-3 inches up with that long of a wheel-base is no easy task.
Idiot got lucky.... - Retuow, on 10/12/2007, -1/+22Respect the Viper roll bar...
- slowmo, on 10/12/2007, -3/+22He could have come up with a better excuse than a "pop". He should have said he swerved to miss a deer or a dog or something.
- Misterm65, on 10/12/2007, -1/+19I call shenanigans/*****. What an idiot, people on ludes should not drive. Reminds me of the dumb ass kid that started up that mustang and tried to drive it through the back of the garage.
- theragu40, on 10/12/2007, -1/+18I'll bet he was going quite a bit faster than he said he was, too...Vipers are pretty low to the ground and have an extremely long wheelbase. You can't just flip them without an extreme amount of force, which would have to be provided by going a hell of a lot faster than 30-40 mph. Even if his mysterious 'pop' was a blown back tire or something, all that would happen would be that the car would spin out. It wouldn't roll.
EDIT: lalusr, you beat me to it. - lemonsensation, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14For all of those people who don't wear seatbelts, let this be a learning experience from other people's misfortunes that seatbelts save lives.
- myAmygdala, on 10/12/2007, -4/+17I would suspect that this uncle and brother in law are having a homosexual affair. Passenger not wearing seat belt... driver loses control... Am I the only one who sees the connection?
- sv650touring, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12while we're at it, go ahead and give geezers refresher courses and reaction-time tests.
- adidos, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYP1qQVDVKc
- batasrki, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11Yes, you are........the only one
- MrVictor, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Yea, I'd say he's full of *****. I would bet he was showing off his new toy to his friend by driving like an idiot and he 'boss-hogged it' and almost got them both killed. Morons should not be allowed to pilot 500hp street rockets.
- EdLesMann, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6"People should be required to take a course before purchasing a high-powered sports car."
3 months ago and I would have disagreed. That was before I went 6 years into debt to get my Corvette. I love that car, but I did not have nearly the experience needed to drive it. Going a bit too fast, hit some gravel and got sideways. If it wasn't for the traction controls...well I don't want to think about it. Now I am enrolled in a driving class specifically for high performance cars. I have learned two major things about Corvettes / High performance cars:
1) There is a lot of power in 400 horses. A lot more then people think. I have yet to push the car anywhere close to its limits but I have already pushed it further then I thought was possible.
2) Respect that power. Hot-dogging in some rice cooker is completely different then in a High Performance car. You tell it to unleash the power, and it will happily oblige.
"Rolling a car that sits 2-3 inches up with that long of a wheel-base is no easy task."
I am not sure. If he had the traction controls off, just the smallest amount of power and you can get those cars sideways. If it was sideways when it hit the grass, I could see it rolling easily. Also, I do not know how many people here have actually driven a Viper (I suspect very few) but Vipers are not exactly known for their handling capabilities. If he begun to lose control and over corrected with that much torque...the possibilities of what could have happened are just about endless...There is a reason why people joke that the Viper actively tries to kill you. There is a lot of power that is harder to control then another car with equal or more power.
"And soccer moms should have to have a classified license to drive 2 ton SUVs while talking on their cell phones too!!"
I agree. Anything that can be considered a large truck should have its own requirements.
"while we're at it, go ahead and give geezers refresher courses and reaction-time tests."
Maybe it is just me but I have seen more accidents by the elderly then I have any other age group. However, it is the youth accidents that are "tragic" and covered in all of the news. Maybe that just the area that I live in. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6do a barrel roll!
- kendallwi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I own a paint/body shop that specializes in Ferraris and I see this crap all of the time. After 25 years (and I don't know how many hi-perf. cars), I have never seen an accident like the one above that was caused by anything but human error. This idiot probably did the same thing as the guy who owns the Viper I'm rebuilding now did. My guy came in with the same story. "I dunno what happened! I was just going down the freeway then suddenly whoa! Then I hit the wall." This is what they both did. See the hill in the picture? The guy went up it in 1st, red-lined it, as he leveled out to go down the hill, shifted into second, which if you were red-lined and lugging the engine would feel like you just got rear ended when he let off the clutch not really knowing how to drive this car! He then proceeded to lose control, went off the road, end of story. This isn't your Chevy Cobalt buddy! The Viper can lay rubber in all gears. The torque and HP to the ground in these cars is just stupid. All that power in the rear and all the weight up front is pretty stupid too. The Viper is probably the ***** hi-perf. car to drive around town and for reasons just like this.
- salinemist, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Wow, there are a lot of morons either on this thread or mentioned herein.
- cawpin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I won't say Vipers are crap, because they're not. They are expensive, more expensive than the better performing C6 Z06 (which isn't a tenth the cost of a GT, about half). They are still beasts though and I would love to get to drive one.
That said, this guy had to try pretty hard to flip one unless, as mentioned above, the drive shaft broke loose from the read and and flipped the car. I doubt it, but it is possible. - stormfilter, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Vipers have always had bump steer issues making them a handful on bumpy roads, it is common for new owners to lose control and jump a curb... its due to the older suspension design that they use
- etx313, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Broken Vipers make baby Jesus cry. :(
- anotherdiggdude, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Pretty lucky. A friend of mine wasn't so lucky. He and his pal were joy riding in his fathers viper on a 10 lane highway in Philly. Racing another car 2 lanes over from the far left, he tried to vere across. When he did, he must've cut the wheel too hard and got airborne at an estimated speed of about 120. He went head on with a bridge overpass abutment. My friend was completely disintegrated upon collision. The driver wound up split away from the passenger side of the car still buckled in his seatbelt with a fractured wrist 100 feet away. The engine rolled away from it's mounts 500 feet.
- ayeroxor, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4"He's going to be fine, but his passenger / brother in law got ejected (for some reason he didn't put his seatbelt on and he's got broken bones all over including his pelvis. Also, there's tire marks all over his jacket as if the car ran over him after he got thrown out)."
Does anyone else snicker when they hear of yet another moron who gets injured/killed because they're too cool or too stupid to wear a seatbelt?
/Paging Darwin... - bills534, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Rolled a 1994 cavalier doing about 65. the road was wet and I hit a puddle, the car started hydroplaning and the back end spun out. went backwards off the road and the back passenger side hit an embankment separating the highways. which caused the car to spin around more, then the front driver side wheel caught the side of the road and the car rolled over onto its hood. and slid along the gravel for a bit. that was fun.
- jaysonx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I am willing to bet that this wreck was very similar to the one shown here:
http://www.torquenstein.net/Torquenstein_Viper_Crash.htm
Bump in the road, wheels get out of alignment, car shoots offroad & driver has no time to correct. - Urusai, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3The moral of this story: wearing seatbelts should be a personal choice.
- UnderWurlde, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Easy to see that it was the pine tree that hit the passenger side + speed that made the car flip. The tree was used as a ramp; the car flipped on the driver side because of it. So it's not just the speed that flipped the car because of a wrong swerve, but the tree.
The question is: why did he go off the road like that? The "jump the hump in the distance" theory seems quite plausible. - maisis00, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I like where the nephew here basically uses the lack of burn marks on the road in his picture to backup his uncle's story. So for starters lets assume the uncle was actually pulling out of his neighborhood as stated and did not just run off the road like an idiot. Okay I know this might be a stretch but lets assume that at least that part of his uncle's story is true. Hehe...
I know that I have disengaged the Dynamic Stability Control (DCS) on my Mazda RX-8 and slid around many a corners without leaving a trace of burn marks. It is not an unheard of thing to happen. At a certain point its almost like you are hydroplaning on dry asphalt where the rear tires actually seem to loose their physical grip on the road and you glide across the surface. Let me tell you it could be very easy for an inexperience driver (with a specific car) to loose control of any car that packs so much torque in the rear end. I mean my RX-8 has a lot of torque and it is definitely no 500hp V10 Viper for Pete's sake.
It sounds to me like he gunned it coming out of the neighborhood which caused the car to fish tail, he panicked and ran off the road. My guess is his mind is not remembering the proper sequence of events with relation to the bang. The bang probably came when the under carriage of his Viper struck the driveway after coming back off the grass. Look at the picture, do you see how low the Vipers wheels were dug into the grass and mud when it finally made contact with the driveway again. Bottoming out a viper on asphalt at high speed would definitely make a very large BANG!!!
As for flipping the car. My guess is his out of control state combined with the hitting of the what was once a healthy evergreen tree caused the actual flipping. - batasrki, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4The only problem with that is that you can see from the pictures that both rear tires are intact. They're not even flat, even after rolling the car
- bclark303, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2OK. I think you have misread the pictures:
"Drivers door smashed" - nope, removed by FD
"Passenger door OK" - so it never touched the ground or the tree
"dirt and grass on the passenger side roll bar" - makes sense if the roll started on the driver side, car does 1/2 roll and lands primarily on the passenger side sill (also means that not wearing his seat belt probably saved the passengers life)
"no braking on the road" - impossible to tell from the pictures. what were the weather conditions, i would assume that this car has ABS and that it was enabled
"car drove on wet ground/grass" - i don't know if I'd call it driving, but ok
"then jumped the sidewalk" - or driveway?
"where all 4 tires left the ground for a good 8 feet" - there is a shot missing here, we have no idea what happened / is in between / how far it is from the picture of the track in the ditch and the shot of the tree. 8 feet is pure speculation, but it is obvious that all 4 wheels did leave the ground. the important event that you missed here is that the car turned at least 90 degrees to the right at some point between the ditch and touching down just before the tree ( I'll back this up in a minute)
"before landing as he was pressing hard on the brakes at the time, seeing that he was about to hit the tree" - again, impossible to determine if he was braking or not, but when he landed the car was not heading head on into the tree.
"I can't see the front passenger side (PS), so I can't tell if it is smashed (hitting that tree)" - there is strong evidence to suggest that no part of the front of the car hit the tree, any damage to the front passenger fender would have been from impact in the ground
"but the wheels on the driver side are full of mud and grass, whereas the PS wheels seem CLEAN." - this is where you start to see what happened after the car touche back down. if the car had turned 90 degrees, the wheels would have immediately dug into the ground and left huge gouges and filled the wheels with mud and grass. both of which are evident in these pictures. since it's the driver side wheels filled with mud, we have to assume that it turned to the right so the driver side was facing the tree when it came down. judging from the driver side damage and the location of the gouges, it looks like the car came down on the driver side wheel and hit the tree just in front of the firewall mid-roll. after hitting the tree, the car landed upside down on the passenger side where it came to rest.
"To have such a low CoG car, weighing at 3400lbs, jumping for a good 8 feet ALL 4 WHEELS, flip like that after braking (albeit in mud), that car was going MUCH faster than that." - not necessarily, take 40 mph forward motion, then translate it almost instantaneously to sideways motion and that car would flip a couple of time before stopping. like i said, we have no evidence of what was going on between the 2 pics of tracks.
as for what caused the accident, there's no way to tell from the pics and the third hand story from an unreliable source (no driver in history has said after an accident "well you see, I was being a hoon and I just couldn't handle the car"). maybe he was telling the truth, maybe he wasn't. if it was a mechanical failure it should be pretty easy to spot on a tear down inspection. my money would definitely be on hoonage though. - w33tz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I don't like how most American muscle type cars have ancient suspension systems that Fred Flintstone wouldn't except. Come on leaf springs and live rear axels were on horse carts....although thats Mustang.
I respect the Viper!!!!
(Preparing to be Dugg down) - mcphatty, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2has anyone considered asking the passenger wtf happened?
- member57, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5@boredandold
Vipers are crap, expensive crap. They have shoddy construction, need CONSTANT maintenance, and look stupid. I remember reading a while back that a certain magazine was doing a contest between a sport bike and a viper. The factory hand picked viper's crankshaft failed and wasted the engine at the starting line for the very first test... JUNK.. - salinemist, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Nah, if they did that they'd realize that a even a new Miata is too fast for public roads when driven at 10/10ths.
- Firehunter, on 10/12/2007, -5/+6Though I do believe something is missing from this story it is possible to roll a car (not an SUV or Truck) at a speed between 45 and 50. I did it. I rolled a Buick LeSabre twice going somewhere between 45 and 50. Granted it slide backwards and sideways into a ditch and hit some logs (which is what made it roll). Chalk that one up to being an inexperienced 16 yr. old driver. A viper on the other hand. . .too low to do that.
- aroundtown, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1That broken piece of 4" x 4" post on the middle of the tracks doesn't seem suspicious to anyone?
- polyGone, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Heh, I flipped a Mazda Miata at close to seventy. I walked away with nothing wrong. If I had my seatbelt on, I wouldn't be writing this.
- nickdiaz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I was halfway in to a long post about how difficult it is for an average driver to understand the amount of torque any generation of viper has, when I realized it would fall on deaf ears here. I think all you're going to get in this list of comments are snipes like "dumbass couldn't control his car".
A better place to pose the question would be the forums on http://www.viperclub.com and http://www.viperalley.com, two very distinctly different communities. You'll get more informed and more intelligent responses.
I can sympathize with your uncle. I ripped off the back half of my first viper within a week of owning it by merely rubbing a curb with the rear tire while in first gear. And I had had plenty of race training. I can't conjecture as to the cause of your uncle's accident, but I'm hoping he and his passenger heal well, and I hope that insurance pays well. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@bclark303
I interpreted the tire marks before the tree differently. I may be wrong, but I got the impression that the wheels were spinning.. and the rears were spinning faster than the fronts causing them to dig in more. If you also factor in the rear end being much lighter than the front and the mud all around the rims of the rear driver side tire, it looks to me as though he was on the gas when he hit the tree. Other than that, I think your analysis is spot on. - sv650touring, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3proper?
http://www.fiftiesweb.com/tv/magnum-pi-ferrari.jpg - Gridl0ck, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Kelsey Grammer (Frasier) flipped his Viper a few years back.
End over end. - wiggimt, on 10/12/2007, -7/+8bored...
The same performance (namely pwr/weight ratio) can be gotten for much cheaper than a Viper, and it would probably handle better too. That being said, there is still a lust for Vipers becauset there are Vipers; the same reason why you would buy a Ford GT over a Corvette Z06, it's slower and costs upwards of tenfold compared to the Z06, but it has a different heritage. - MateyO, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Looks like he ran out of talent before he ran out of turn.
- UnderWurlde, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You're right - after the sidewalk/driveway, the car was sideways, hence the dirt in the wheels and the much larger distance between the skids. Good catch, Sherlock! And the tree is pretty much right where the driver's door was. So there is a huuuuge gap of unknown info from the first "grass" picture to the second one.
That car is just a BEAST very few drivers can tame! - amillion3, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4I love this guy's comment 'htrodblder':
The one time he forgets to take his "easy" button with him... - Aliarse, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Has the money to buy a nice car, shame he doesn't have the required skills to drive said nice car.
- brokekneck, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4 Drive shaft broke loose from the rear end. It explains everything. He could have been doing 20 mph, if it breaks loose and makes it way sideways(which they do) thats all she wrote. Explains the loud bang, when it broke it probably threw the rear end up alittle when you consider the horse power and torque. Which would explain feeling like being hit. Then probably flipped it sideways.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@cawpin
If you check the accident photos, you will notice that he was sideways before hitting the bush as others have noted. From the dig pattern in the dirt, it is clear that the rear wheels were spinning much faster than the front wheels causing them to dig in more (rear was to the left and can be determined from the mud pattern on the car). So, that tells me that he was on the gas when he hit the bush. This is a simple loss of control, panicked and floored it accident. (He also may have been airborn right after he left the driveway). Driver error. - SteelChicken, on 10/12/2007, -5/+6further evidence most performance cars are well beyond the capabilities of ordinary drivers.
wanna know what the biggest obstacle is in being a faster driver? Look in the mirror. Take some driving courses. -
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