We have seen and featured hundreds, perhaps thousands of crash videos here on BangShift over the years, but we’ve never seen anything like this. Aussie V8 Supercar racer David Besnard suffered a big crash at the 2011 Bathurst event and it evidently tore the fuel cell off of the back of the car. You’ll see the machine sitting in a large puddle of fluid. As it turns out, that’s gasoline and it all ignites. The ensuing blaze is like something from George Lucas’s CGI department.
Besnard is able to climb out of the car after the safety crew squelches the flames. According to the announcer, the race car had 120L of fuel on board which is about 30 gallons. Watch the whole video to see the wreck and the ignition of the fire in slow motion. We’re thinking that the heat of the pavement ignited the vapor and turned into a blazing inferno of Hellfire after that!
The fuel is E85 not gasoline as such. They changed to E85 a couple of years ago apparently for ecological reasons but the extra fuel burned pretty much negates any gain from the ethanol content.
Kudos to the safety guys- way to be on top of things. They kept this from being a nightmare.