As if having to drive with one hand on a race track isn’t difficult enough, having your side curtain airbags deploy out of the blue really does make for a pretty bad experience.
According to the video’s description, the driver’s right hand is paralyzed, which is why he was only using his left. Unfortunately for him, something went wrong with that Camaro’s sensors.
By the way, this is not the first such incident. Back in 2011, the curtain airbags of an older Camaro SS deployed while it was drifting. Then, last year, a Camaro ZL1’s side bags went off simply because its custom exhaust was too loud!
The latter incident occurred because the car vibrated so much under acceleration that the sensor got overloaded, which is understandable since the exhaust diverter was positioned almost directly underneath the sensor. As for the first, it might have had something to do with the G-forces, since the side airbags are designed to deploy only under specific conditions.
What happened on this latest occasion seems to point to some type of error, too. We do see that the car hit the curb hard on that right hand corner, so that could have fooled the control unit to “think” there was an accident, thus triggering the airbags. Thankfully, the driver only suffered a scare.