Isn’t it great that the big three are starting to produce insanely powered musclecars again? We have Hellcats, Shelbys, and ZL1s that have more than twice the power of the best cars Detroit offered us in the 1980s. But the one thing we don’t seem to have enough of these days is common sense.
Over the years, we’ve been complaining as we watch our local car shows and Cars and Cofffee get shut down left and right. And it’s all because of people acting with total disregard towards how fortunate we are to have such events to show off our cars, and to share with other car owners.
Take the driver of this formerly nice Shelby GT500 in the video above, who decides to show off a little bit as he’s leaving a car show. Sure, we’ve all experienced that pressure before – where people on the sidelines with smartphone in hand are just waiting for us to paint some elevens. And like the puppets that some people are, they romp the throttle to show off, and guess what happens next?
In this driver’s case, we have the beginning: him leaving the car show; and the ending: him in the hospital. How did he go from cool to fool? By romping the skinny pedal, pitching the car sideways, and as he careens out of control in rookie fashion he crashes into the back of a pickup truck, finally coming to rest against another Mustang.
What so many people like this guy seem to forget is that the part about showing off is that you’re not supposed to destroy your car in the process. The simplest way for this driver to have avoided this embarrassment – and the nightmare that followed – would have been to just maintain composure. Unfortunately, he gave in to the crowd, and now he has a painful reminder that he can watch over and over again.
We don’t condone doing burnouts when leaving a car show, but we know it happens. It’s easy to succumb to chanting bystanders, and much harder to do the right thing. But sometimes, it’s best to just give the crowd a soundbite and rev a couple times as you leave. But now two other vehicle owners have a major headache on their hands, too. Was it all worth it? Not for this guy. So much open road, and so much fail.