No matter what the wreck-filled commercials and the popular, continually recycled historic footage might lead you to believe, most racing crashes aren’t reminiscent of Hot Wheels cars flying off of a poorly built ramp. This one was.
Harrison Scott races the Pro Mazda Championship on the IndyCar development ladder, but he didn’t get to race much in the series’ doubleheader in Toronto over the weekend—he was out of both races on the first lap. One of those race-ending issues was mechanical, and the other was this: a wreck that’s almost hard to believe happened, no matter how many times you watch the video.
The wreck happens around 40 seconds into this video from the Saturday race below, and there’s another angle on Twitter. Scott was OK after the wreck and cleared to race the next day, but that didn’t go too well either.
A race recap on the Pro Mazda website said Scott was racing next to the No. 91 car of Antonio Serravalle on Saturday when the wreck all started, and the two got into each other on a straight section heading into the third turn. That turn was where things got really bad, and Scott shot through the air at catch fence height—at least, that’s how high it looked from the angle the camera.
Scott posted on Twitter after the race Saturday that he was cleared to race on Sunday, and the Pro Mazda recap from the second race of the weekend said his RP Motorsports Racing team “performed wonders” to fix his car before the race. But on the first lap, again, Scott was out. The recap said Scott was braking into the first turn when an “unexplained” suspension failure took him out.
Surely whatever happened there couldn’t have been harder to explain than that original wreck, but the world is full of surprises—like race cars flying through the air as if an invisible Hulk got mad and tossed them.