Miracle escape from Ferrari smash
Published: February 23, 2006
A rare Ferrari Enzo was severed in half in a horror 240 km/h-plus smash that caused mayhem on California’s Pacific Coast Highway. The owner of the Enzo, which was reportedly seen dicing a McLaren Mercedes SLR, suffered only minor wounds.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputies estimate the car was going faster than 240 km/h, perhaps topping 320 km/h, when it began swerving on the highway in the early hours of Tuesday. The Enzo went 6m up an embankment, smashed into an electricity pole and left a 400-m trail of shattered debris in its wake. The engine came to a rest in the middle of the road, and the passenger compartment continued spinning another 50m down the shoulder.
“It sounded like a huge lumber truck or something lost its load and started scraping down the highway,” a witness told the Malibu Times. “Stuff was falling everywhere.”
Sheriff’s investigators identified the owner as Stefan Ericksson, 44, who emerged from the wreck - with a broken lip!
When police arrived on the scene, Eriksson (who reportedly had a blood alcohol content level of .09) told officials he hadn’t been driving the vehicle, and that the man behind the wheel, who he knew only as a German named “Dietrich,” fled on foot before paramedics arrived. Sergeant Phillip Brooks was quoted as saying that both airbags had deployed in the Ferrari. However, Brooks said only the driver side airbag had blood on it.
Witnesses had seen the red car speeding through Trancas just before the accident and one bystander was reportedly willing to testify that he saw the Ferrari racing an equally-rare McLaren Mercedes SLR, which rapidly fled the scene of the smash.
Dangling power lines and hundreds of pieces of carbon fibre and metal ensured the closure of the Pacific Coast Highway for two hours. A high-voltage distribution line feeding Decker Canyon and La Chusa was destroyed, leaving 1 475 homes without power.
“He destroyed one of the finest cars on Earth, maybe the finest,” said Ferrari owner Chris Banning, a writer who is finishing a book on the cult of sports-car racing along winding Mulholland Drive. “It’s like taking a Van Gogh painting and burning it.”
Gil Lucero, the Pacific region chairman of the Ferrari Club of America, said only 399 Enzos were built at Maranello between 2002 and 2004. The a 400th car was built and donated to Pope John Paul II and later sold to raise R7,65 million for charity.
Used Enzos currently fetch between R6 million and R9 million on the US market, Lucero said. He added: “I think the price went up another R600 000 with today’s crash”.
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