When all you care about is fast lap times, driving a car that’s as light as possible can ultimately make a tremendous difference in your favor.
This is why car manufacturers will actually charge you more for fast models that basically come with less features – all for the sake of being quicker when out on the track.
Of course, racing without a door is probably not something lots of drivers are interested in doing – though unfortunately it’s exactly what happened here to this E46 BMW M3, while racing on the Nurburgring.
The passenger-side door is already cracked open a tiny bit at the beginning of the video, and your guess is as good as ours as to why that was. Perhaps it was already damaged and the driver didn’t realize it was about to fly off its hinges, or perhaps he thought that it couldn’t happen while knowing about the damage.
Either way, it did happen, and it happened at 280 km/h (173 mph) near the end of a straight, just moments after the M3 flew past a Porsche 911.
Hopefully the door didn’t make contact with the Porsche, since at that speed anything coming of a car is a legitimate projectile.