By far and wide one of the most sphincter-tightening moments you can have behind the wheel of a vehicle is when the hood flies up while you are driving. It doesn’t matter if you’re just tooling around town or racing, that will put an icy spike of fear deep within your soul as you try to come up with a solution to the problem while not crashing or causing harm to anything or anyone. It’s not an easy juggling act to do…I know from first-hand experience, and I’m lucky enough to say that the only damage done in my incident involved four flat-spotted tires and the windshield, which was broken when the hood hit it. That was doing 70 miles an hour on a wide country road in the prairie area of eastern Colorado. Now, imagine you are in one seriously boosted Holden Commodore VL. We’re talking one serious mo-fo, an eight-second car, and at the top end of the track, your hood decides that now is the perfect time to pull a disappearing act by first coming up, then completely off. Yep, it happened, and we’re certain that the only person more scared than the VL’s driver was the guy in the Nissan S15 who had the hood land directly in front of him at the top end.
I’m guessing the duct tape wasn’t rated to 200mph :/