Owning the first example of a sports car is something a lot of people strive for but being the first to crash a new high performance car is something you’d rather not have on your record.
As we reported yesterday, ‘About.com Cars’ auto journalist Aaron Gold who’s also the Vice President of the Los Angeles-based Motor Press Guild (MPG) and a consulting producer on Top Gear USA, now bears the title of being the first person outside of GM to have crashed the Camaro ZL1 during its presentation at the Virginia International Raceway.
Thankfully, no one was hurt – not even the airbags were deployed. GM told Gold that the damage was cosmetic, but as he acknowledges, maybe the company didn’t want to make him feel that bad…
“Those few times when younger journalists have asked me for advice, I have always said ‘Observe the situation, figure out who that guy is, and Don’t Be That Guy”, Gold wrote on a new posting about the incident at ‘About.com Cars‘. “Today, I was That Guy”, he admitted.
So, how did the accident happen? Surely, a 580HP rear-wheel drive Camaro is not the kind of car you just hop in and give it some serious boot straight away – unless you are a professional race driver, or a complete lunatic. Gold is neither.
He is also not afraid to tell it like it is: “I’d like to tell you I was hot-shoeing around the track, came into a corner full on the brakes at 120mph, spun three times, caught on fire, and slammed into the tire wall.”
No such thing happened. In fact, Gold says he was driving “relatively slowly and cautiously” on a slow part of the track when it started to rain. Unfortunately, he was “way off” the proper line and had the gearbox in second when he should have changed to third. He also pushed the right pedal too much, the rear tires lost traction on the slippery track surface and he ended up, nose first, into the tire wall.
Despite the damage, when the track workers arrived and pulled the front bumper and fender away, the ZL1 instantly fired away as the only mechanical damage was a leaking washer-fluid tank.
So, were the Chevrolet men angry with him when he returned? Gold says not at all: “They were quite accommodating – you’d never guess I had just driven their $60,000 press car into a wall of tires. As long as I was all right, they said, that was all that mattered.”
The auto journalist producer puts the blame on himself, not the car: “High-power, rear-drive cars can be quite a handful, but the truth is that the ZL1 is much more tame than other such cars I’ve driven. A better driver probably could have gathered it up, but I didn’t.”
Photo Credits: Aaron Gold
