The Rimac Nevera is the quickest-accelerating production car ever launched and despite it having almost 2,000 hp, the CTO of one automaker thought it would be a good idea to try and drift one. It wasn’t a good idea.
Earlier this week, we brought you a clip featuring Nico Rosberg and Mate Rimac driving the ex-Formula 1 champion’s recently-delivered Rimac Nevera. The two had a very interesting chat about the Nevera and the automotive industry as a whole with Mate himself spilling the beans on how a Nevera prototype was totaled.
“There was a CTO of one big, big car company – one of the biggest car companies in the world,” that attempted to drift the Nevera on a racetrack, Mate Rimac explains. This CTO asked if he could switch the car into its Drift mode and despite the Rimac team urging them to get used to the car first, he insisted and put the car into Drift mode.
Read Also: Nico Rosberg Takes Delivery Of The First Retail Rimac Nevera
“First corner, he loses the car, rolls into poles and takes three poles out,” Mate reveals. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the third pole that the Nevera hit broke in two, leaving behind a large steel spike jutting out from the ground. Mate says that the hypercar came to rest on this spike and that it pierced the battery pack.
Fortunately, the battery pack didn’t catch fire and the unnamed CTO was not injured in the crash.
Given how many car manufacturers Rimac is currently or has previously worked with in the past, it’s hard to know just which automaker Mate is referring to. His explanation that it was the CTO of one of the “biggest car companies in the world” suggests it may have been someone from the Volkswagen Group or perhaps from Hyundai that owns a stake in the Croatian automaker.