Ferrari Mailing List: Re: That big accident in Japan

[Dennis Liu (bigheaddennis]

Thanks, Adam.  I first heard about this on Sunday, then my inbox got filled with forwards from friends who heard about it too.  I didn't know the details until now.  According to police, it happened at 10:16 am, on a "rain-soaked" four-lane highway.  Witnesses claimed that the Ferraris "zoomed" by at 90 mph.  The driver that started the chain reaction is a senior citizen, and admitted, "'I was driving at a faster speed than the legal limit. I had attempted to change lanes while driving in the passing lane, but the rear wheels of my car skidded, prompting my car to hit the guardrail', said the 60 year old Ferrari driver."

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/eight-ferraris-crash-at-gathering-of-narcissists-in-japan/2011/12/05/gIQAmyS9XO_story.html

 

If you watch the video and check out the road, it appears that there are no medians on either side of the highway -- just the walls/fencing, which will produce a pinball effect.  Not unlike what we've all seen at any F1 or Indycar street race course.  This is, of course, NOT a race course, and shouldn't be excused as such.  But we have to ask ourselves -- whether in a Ferrari or not, have you ever driven with friends on a highway, where you've gone 90 mph?  (Of course, we don't know that they were actually going 90mph, because non-professional estimates of speed are notoriously off, particularly when Ferraris are involved, as we all know.)  Around here, even on tighter highways like that in the video, speeds of 75 mph+ are common.  Which isn't to say that 90 mph is necessarily safe, but 90 mph when others are traveling 65 mph to 75 mph is NOT the same as doing 140 mph.  I'll bet that every single person reading this email has, with some friends, done 90 mph on a four-lane highway in "tight formation", even in the wet.

 

Beyond that, it seems reasonable to conclude that when the lead driver changed lanes, the rear end hit the oil-slick, wet portion of the road between lanes (which we've also all done), and he had some power oversteer.  Perhaps untrained, he may have caught it, but the loading of the springs inevitable cause the rebound to toss him in the other direction (I'd say that this is probably the #1 cause of off-track excursions at DE events).  But since this road had fencing/railing right at the edge, he would have bounced back and started that reaction.  Were follow distances unsafely too short?  Almost certainly.  Was this a big fat costly mistake that will cost the driver millions of yen, and possibly loss of his license.  Almost certainly.

 

But before we all pile on and rush to judgment, ask yourself -- if you were there, would you have done the same thing?  And haven't you done the same thing yourself?

 

That's all.

 

vty,

 

--Dennis

 

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From: adam.green [at] gmail.com [mailto:adam.green [at] gmail.com] On Behalf Of Adam Green
Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2011 12:54 PM
To: BigHeadDennis [at] gmail.com
Subject: Re: [Ferrari] That big accident in Japan

On Wed, Dec 7, 2011 at 9:24 AM, Dennis Liu <bigheaddennis [at] gmail.com> wrote:

A friend just forwarded me this thread.  Thanks for thinking of me!  :-)  A
couple of comments:


It's enjoyable -- and hilarious -- for us to theorize what happened in
Japan.  We may all take guesses as to what caused the accident.  And we may
even be correct!!  But we don't know, do we?  **I** think that the group was
going fast, and one driver loses control and the chain reaction was massive.
But that could also be true even if no one was driving particularly unsafely
-- e.g., on one of the times that Creampuff spun his 308 (with me in the
car), he wasn't going that fast - just that his old tires were overinflated
and the pavement was very cold (and, as David Perry, er I mean Charles Perry
will immediately point out, having Dennis as a passenger means that the
center of gravity changes massively, laterally and altitudinally).  What if
someone was following a little closer?  Could the same thing have happened
to us?  Sure.  Chain reaction wrecks happen all the time -- we read about
pile-ups involving 20 cars, 50 cars.  Do we know what the weather conditions
were at the time of the accident?  Could it have been caused by an animal
running into the road, or a truck that just happened to change lanes, or
whatever?  Sure.  Again, my immediate, quick-to-judge reaction is the same
as all of yours.  But that doesn't mean that we're necessarily right.

Perhaps this was written some time ago.  The reports were of eye witness accounts of the drivers trying to drive in "formation" (two by two) and very close to each other and much faster than permitted on that road.  They also reported on the weather and road conditions, etc.  Not a lot of conjecture there.  

More importantly, "could this happen to us?" ... no way, no <expletive> way.  Even if a herd of deer took out the lead car and maybe the next car gets entangled in the mess, the driver of the third car should be able to find the brake pedal.  The fourth car, the tenth car ... all these drivers should be able to stop in a single lane and avoid creating a chain reaction.  What might then happen is the last Ferrari in the line might get rear-ended by an inattentive driver in a vehicle that couldn't match the braking distance check.