Last week we reported on a major crash involving a YouTuber and his Tesla Model S Plaid. The stripped-out sedan was in the running to one day be the fastest of its kind before a major accident at the end of a long straightaway totaled it. Now, the owner is back with an update on what happened and why he wasn’t wearing any safety gear.
The YouTuber is Cheyenne Lord, the man behind the channel Chillin with Chet, and his latest video focused on the accident in question. After hitting 170 mph on a closed racetrack the upgraded brakes on his Tesla Model S Plaid failed and he ended up sliding into a tire wall. He escaped but not without significant injury.
In this new update, he details those injuries including broken ribs, a broken knee cap, a fractured tibia, and a torn ACL. Despite what that long and surely painful list entails, Lord thinks it would’ve been hard to escape with much less injury than he did considering the exact circumstances of the crash.
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For example, he says that because his left arm was positioned high above his torso as he tried to steer out of the turn it exposed his ribs but that a head-on collision with the wall could’ve been much worse. In fact, he thinks that even if his arm had been down, his neck and head might have taken even more damage as his positioning at the time of the crash helped to protect those vital areas.
As for what happened, Lord fully blames the crash on the DOT 3 brake fluid that was still in the system at the time of the incident. What we didn’t know from the last episode is that Lord and his team had bled the brakes and refilled what was lost with a proper race-spec brake fluid. What they failed to do was to fully flush the system of the OEM DOT 3 and as Lord puts it, when that fluid boiled over, he lost braking power.
He fully admits that he should’ve been wearing a helmet but doesn’t stop there saying that he should’ve had a complete safety suit including a HANS device to protect the forces that were exerted on his neck and head during the incident. At this point he’s glad that he made it out alive and hopes to salvage some parts of the car to build some sort of MadMax-style EV.