The fact that there’s 20 full minutes of lowlights from one racing weekend should tell you that maybe a certain “historic” racing venue is a tad sketch. That’s what the 2017 Macau Grand Prix weekend gave us thanks to the mad genius behind CrashRacing. My only beef is that it’s not set to “Spanish Flea” or the Benny Hill Show theme.
Macau always gives us a special kind of lowlight reel, as many of these clips aren’t just chunks of bodywork flying off from minor contact, but big, race-halting messes that completely obstruct the flow of the track.
Multiple series are included in this video—the Chinese Racing Cup, multiple classes of the Macau Touring Car Cup, the World Touring Car Championship, the FIA GT World Cup, and FIA Formula 3—and they all feature someone getting wrecked.
One truly, ahem, special (and by “special,” I mean dangerous as hell) moment involves a car on fire getting hit from behind right after the car-b-que’s driver just made it safely over the wall.
In another clip, the commentators aren’t even sure if you can be classified if you cause the red flag that stops the race. You can under the WTCC’s rules this year, which seems counter-intuitive if you want to discourage those kinds of wrecks, but is at least consistent with other series’ prior incidents at Macau.
Not every clip in here is a total fail, though. Markus Pommer’s epic FIA GT World Cup spin at 11:07 in the video is a solid candidate for Save of the Year.
Either way, many of these race sessions are 15 laps or less, yet the fields can’t hold it together even for that. Some of these drivers don’t even make past the first lap before a big, dumb pileup breaks out, and rain on the circuit this year certainly exacerbated that issue.
One might get the impression that there’s a serious course design problem at Macau that might need solving. Hmmmmmmmmm.
We get it: Macau has a long history of racing, but cars are bigger now. The Bentley Continental GT3-R alone is larger than some New York City apartments. You can’t send it and many other similarly embiggened cars through that tiny course and expect crashes not to happen.
If the Macau Grand Prix’s car races this year are anything, they are a testament to the wonders of modern auto racing safety equipment. The drivers were able to walk away just fine from all this car-carnage, albeit probably a little shaken.