ZR1 Down! Pace Car Driver Serves Brand New Corvette to the Wall

If you were to catch wind of a crash at an IndyCar race, you’d probably expect one of the drivers of the race cars to be the one to have gotten tied up in a collision, but instead, straight from the 2018 Detroit Grand Prix on Belle Isle, we’re seeing headlines about another crash entirely that went down on that day.

It’s an unfortunate reality that once a performance-oriented vehicle is released to the general public, that, it won’t be long before one of them ends up getting wrecked and posted all around the web somehow. Most of the time, it’s only a matter of time before an overzealous owner ends up putting one into a wall or rolls one into a ditch. This time, however, we check out an unlikely way to see one of the first C7 Chevrolet Corvette ZR1s to be wrecked as it goes down in a spot with lots of eyes trained on it.

It all happened at the IndyCar race featuring a pace car as the ZR1, sporting this brilliant new architecture designed to draw some attention to Chevrolet. However, as it would turn out, before long, Chevrolet would learn that they would be getting some unwanted attention as the man behind the wheel here, General Motors executive Vice President of Global Product Development, Mark Reuss, ended up in quite the awkward situation when the car simply had gotten away from him and veered off into a wall, doing some big-time damage right in the middle of broadcast. Luckily, it doesn’t look like anybody was injured here during the near-half-hour delay but the Corvette is certainly going to need some attention if anyone plans on using it again, that is.

The video below shows off the broadcast where it all went down and that Corvette would meet with its ugly fate that day. You have to feel for this Mark, who would later apologize for the fiasco. It’s not every day that somebody wrecks a pace car and has a situation like that unfold in your lap but it would appear as if most agree that it could’ve happened to just about anyone.

General Motors would come out and say: “We are thankful that there were no serious injuries. Both the pace car driver and the series official were taken to the infield care center, where they were checked, cleared and released.” They chalked the incident up to multiple contributing factors, “including weather and track conditions.” They would continue that “The car’s safety systems performed as expected.”