Respect the Rollbar: Holy Crap, My Uncle Flipped His Viper...And Lived To Tell The Story!

I think the gallery below and the post over at SVT Performance tells you everything you need to know here:

My uncle has been bugging the hell out of me to help him find a red Viper. We end up finding him a nice 04 with only 3K miles on it. Perfect shape and not a scratch or mark on it! He brought it by Friday afternoon to show it off to me. 24 hours later I'm having dinner with my wife and my cell phone keeps ringing. Pissed off, I finally pull it out of my pocket and it's his boss/friend telling me that I needed to rush to the hospital and my uncle just flipped his new Viper. 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). Really odd accident!

Respect The Viper Rollbar

Need help here for anyone with thoughts on what could have happened. My uncle told me he just pulled out of his neighborhood and knew the car was cold so he wasn't getting on it at all. Plus, he lives right where it happened and knows there's a stop sign just up the road. So, speed really didn't have much to do with this. He says he just went into second, barely rolling along at about 30-40 mph and he hears a LOUD bang or pop! His first instinct was that he got rearended somehow, said that's what it felt like. The next thing he knows, the steering is gone and the car veers off the road, across a driveway and then BAM, he's upside down, stuck in the mud!

Imagine being in the dark, buried in mud, upside down with your new VIPER on top of you and you can hear the motor running and the tires still spinning. He pulled out his cell phone and started calling people telling them he was under the car! The people on the scene thought the ejected guy was the driver and the car was empty! He heard them outside and started yelling....HELP ME, I'M UNDER THE CAR! I can't say enough about the factory roll bars that are behind the headrests in these vipers. It stayed in place and kept his head from being smeared flat. (Sounds brutal, I know...but it's true)

ANYONE have thoughts on what the loud bang/pop could have been? Do these VIPERS have driveshafts known to break? The way the car ended up facing and upside down, it's almost like it catapulted and the rear flipped up and over somehow. ANY HELP / THOUGHTS WOULD BE APPRECIATED!

I know there's a few guys in this forum that are Viper owners/ fans that might be able to shed some light on possible known malfunctions with these cars and their suspension / driveshafts breaking???? The loud bang / pop my uncle describes just makes it sound like something broke or let go in the car.
As the pics show, there's no burnout marks on the road and the car ended up only 25 feet from the road.....so it's pretty much impossible that he was going very fast at all.

"HELP ME, I'M UNDER THE CAR!"

[via SVT Performance]

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