The cross-country street legal One Lap of America rolled into Road America for their latest stage today, leading the drivers of the CTS-V Sport Wagon to roll their wagon so hard it flipped over a retaining wall. The car spared itself with an explosion of airbags so that the driver could walk away uninjured. UPDATE
One Lap is basically a vestige of the Cannonball Run, but designed not to break as many laws. Now the format has drivers going from track to track in street cars putting down laps as opposed to just making one giant lap of America. Matt Farah of The Smoking Tire was on the scene today at Road America in his stock BMW X5 M (which is apparently fighting it out with the factory SRT8 Jeep team) and witnessed this extreme crash.
We don't know exactly what happened, but speed + RWD + over-the-limit isn't a bad guess.
"Amazing the driver didn't get hurt, this thing is so fucked," Farah tweeted.
Farah says the car went over a retaining wall, which is an extreme accomplishment. The result is an empty space where the front suspension used to be and an überwagon that's now officially toast.
UPDATE I spoke with Brock Yates earlier this evening and he explained that the experienced driver of the vehicle has a long history racing, both with One Lap and in general, and that the cause of the crash was the CTS-V going into "ice mode," which he says caused the ABS to react in a way that lead to the crash. Thus, it was apparently a vehicle quirk, not driver error, that led to the crash.