Walking away from the big one: How Corvette built a safer race car

In the run-up to this year's 24 Hours of Le Mans, Danish racing ace Jan Magnussen had a frightening crash in the #63 Chevrolet Corvette. It was during the final qualifying session on June 11 as Magnussen was going through the Porsche Curves, a fast right-left-right-left section of the track. At 135 mph (217kp/h), instead of turning into the first left-hander, his race car went head-first into the safety barriers lining the track, spinning him around and sending him backwards into a wall on the opposite side.

But shockingly, Magnussen escaped without injury. And given the spectacle, we had to find out how this was possible. We spoke with Corvette Racing's boss, Doug Fehan, at a recent round of the Tudor United Sports Car Championship (TUSC) in Watkins Glen, New York.

Jan Magnussen's accident at Le Mans this year. You can see the car lost very little speed between the first and second impacts, caused by a throttle sticking open at 135mph.

Magnussen's crash was traced to debris in the throttle-return linkage that caused the throttle to stick open. Although he was able to shed a little speed by shifting down a gear or two (and applying 1400psi/9.65 MPa pressure to the brake pedal), the team estimate his first impact was around 102mph (164kph/h). As you can see from the video above, he lost very little speed before the second impact. The damage to the car was so bad that it couldn't be repaired in time for the race—so bad in fact that the car still isn't fixed and Corvette Racing had to borrow a year-old car that they sold to customer team Larbre Competition for the TUSC races that followed Le Mans.

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