To err is human. Even when that human is legendary driver Walter Rohrl. He’s been driving at the limit of high-performance street and race cars since well before I was even born. He’s won more races than should be humanly possible. Even as he gracefully ages, he always seems to be around when a German manufacturer needs to show off the speed of their car for the media, or even the public. In most instances, he’s seen as a safe pair of hands at the helm. This time, though, something went a bit wrong.
If you speak German, you can probably translate better than we can, but we got something to the effect that the Porsche was travelling at about 200 kilometers per hour when the spin occurred, and that Mr. Rohrl thinks there might have been something on the track that instigated the shunt. Things get out of hand pretty quickly when you are travelling at 120 miles per hour, and even faster when it all starts to go sideways. Fortunately for Walter, he remained calm, kept his wits about him, and very nearly pulled out of the slide and drove away. For most people, when you are in a spin, you’re supposed to go “two feet in”. For someone like Walter Rohrl, though, he can modulate throttle and steering to make something like that work. Unfortunately for him, in this case, things were a bit too far gone to save completely. One thing is for sure, this could have been a whole lot worse if he hadn’t been on top of things as well as he was.
The Porche doesn’t look like it was hit hard enough to not be repaired, and Walter is certainly alright, so at the end of the day, things are pretty alright. No idea who owns the car, though, I’m sure that person is less than ecstatic at the moment.
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Interesting that the wind shield wipers were engaged when he was trying to straighten out the car. That has been many a complaint from Porsche owners who hit the wiper stalk when trying to move the steering wheel rapidly to counter act a car out of control.
No air bag deployment