Motorsport can be dangerous. But just as often it can be slightly embarrassing when you have the kind of dumb crash that could easily be avoided, the kind of crash that leaves you physically unhurt, but with some significant damage to your pride and bank balance.
Having once crashed out of a race in a Volkswagen Golf GTi despite being nowhere near any other car I can sympathize with the Australian driver of the Toyota GR Yaris in this video.
Omar Hasan was taking part in a hillclimb event in his competition-prepped GR Yaris when his car decided it would much rather play in the dirt, than stick to the road. It begins understeering on a fairly tight left hand curve and just keeps on understeering right into the verge, before making contact with something that suddenly sends the rear of the car into the air as it pivots around its nose, then crashes to the ground with a sickening “clunk”.
Related: WRC Driver Somehow Escapes This Terrifying Crash Uninjured
As with any accident immortalized on YouTube, it’s easy to pick a millions things the driver did wrong and boast about all the things we would have done differently. With that in mind, our two cents is that Hasan seems to push the nose too hard initially then responds to the understeer by keeping a huge armful of lock applied and blipping the throttle, perhaps hoping that it might kick the tail out to save the day.
His best bet would have been to unwind some lock and get on the GR Yaris’s brakes early on in the curve when it became clear the nose was washing wide. And as one commenter suggests, learning to left foot brake can be very useful in these situations.
But that’s all said with the benefit of hindsight, and Hasan happily pokes fun at himself and the mess he made of things in the heat of the moment. “Performed by non-professional driver on a closed road. Do not attempt to replicate this piece of average driving,” is how he starts his description of the video.
Fortunately the Yaris is fully kitted out with harnesses and bucket seats to keep the driver in place, and a full roll cage that includes some substantial overhead bracing, meaning Hasan was in no danger of suffering serious injury in this kind of collision.
It’s unlikely that the car got off as lightly, though. There are no images of the aftermath, and Hasan doesn’t mention its fate in the video description, but it’s likely that it’s going to need some shop time before it gets back to timing itself up any closed stretches of Australian hillside. Hopefully that won’t take too long, because it looks and sounds like a fun machine, something we get to see in some of the driver’s other (crash-free) videos like the one above.