When building or modifying a car, many people place too much emphasis on power and straight-line performance without also upgrading the brakes. This is what can happen when you make such a mistake.
In December last year, the guys over at the AutotopiaLA channel on YouTube were filming a feature about a 1964 Mercury Comet. The car was built by its owner over a period of 23 years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to put together.
The highlight of the car is its 632 cubic-inch Chevrolet V8 complete with a massive supercharger that’s pumping out 1,300 hp. That’s a phenomenal amount of power and needs to be matched with some equally-as-powerful brakes. However, the car’s brakes had not been updated for 17 years and were no longer up for the task.
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While filming some rolling footage of the car, the owner states that it has a sticky throttle and that he needs to ride the brakes to keep it at cruising speeds. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for the brakes to overheat and completely fail, resulting in a terrifying crash.
Footage shared to YouTube shows that shortly after pulling away from an intersection, the driver accelerates up to around 50 mph when suddenly the brakes fail just a few hundred feet away from traffic at a red light. The car didn’t have an emergency brake and the driver had no other choice than to slam into the rear of a black Honda Odyssey at the intersection.
The crash is extraordinarily violent and made worse by the fact that both the driver and passenger were only wearing lap belts. The force of the impact sends the passenger’s face directly into the metal dashboard while the driver’s decision to lock out his arms before the impact resulted in one of his elbows being blown completely out. The lack of airbags only made things worse.
Fortunately, neither the passenger nor driver of the Comet were seriously injured, nor was the driver of the minivan.