Taking your car to the track can be great fun, right up until the moment it isn’t, as the driver of this Honda S2000 discovered.
On a circuit you can push your car harder and at higher speeds than you can on the street, learning about its behavior and your driving ability, all in relative safety. ‘Relative’ being the operative word here, because when you’re covering ground at speeds often in excess of 100 mph (160 km/h), and frequently at, and sometimes beyond, the tires’ ability to grip the pavement, there’s a chance you or your car might end up on a gurney.
Fortunately for this S2000 owner, it looks like only his pride, and his Honda, was hurt in this crash at New Jersey Motorsports Park earlier this summer.
While making the right turn onto the start-finish straight, the rear of the S2000 steps out quickly with the digital speedometer reading 110 mph (177 km/h). The driver valiantly piles on the counter steering in an attempt to save the car from a spin, but it’s only half successful.
Related: The Honda S2000 CR Was One Of The Best Sports Cars Of The 2000s
For a moment, it looks like he might just get away with it, and the car will just slide parallel to the pit wall and come to a stop. But instead, the nose of the Honda makes contact with the tire wall and both airbags are deployed. When we hear him yell “damn it” and go to thump the console just before the video clicks off, you feel his pain and frustration.
You can bet that the driver has analyzed the footage a million times trying to work out where he went wrong. And as is always the case with this kind of action cam footage, there are plenty of commenters willing to throw in their two cents.
Perhaps if he’d taken more curb on the right as he apexed, or if he’d apexed later, he would have been able to exit with less steering lock applied when he hit the slippier curbing on the left. And maybe if the pit wall was just a plain wall, and not decorated with lumpy, grippy tires, the S2000 might have rubbed against it without firing off those airbags. And maybe… you get the idea. I’m sure the driver has considered them all.
But hindsight is a wonderful thing. What’s clear from the crash video and the driver’s other YouTube uploads, including the one above filmed at the same circuit, is that he’s a pretty solid trackday pilot with quick reactions that was unlucky on this occasion. And he’s not the first, and certainly won’t be the last, person to wreck Honda’s notoriously twitchy two-seater. Here’s hoping the damage wasn’t too bad. Do you think you could have done better?