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Toyota GT 86 Nurburgring Crash: Why NFS Driving Doesn’t Work in Real Life

We all know the feeling when you drop all the rules in your code and just use a guardrail as your personal assistant for taking corners. This, of course, works brilliantly in many installments of the Need For Speed franchise, but what happens when you try the move in real life?
Toyota GT 86 Nurburgring Crash 1 photo
Photo: image edited by autoevolution
The clip below brings a pretty painful answer to that question, showing us a track-prepped Toyota GT 86 rental. In a pretty similar fashion to what NFS fans experience when playing their favorite game, the guy who rented the GT 86 allowed his enthusiasm to overcome the car’s grip limits, entering a corner way to hard - notice the velocity difference between the Toyota and the other cars making their way through the corner.

Thus, the GT 86 runs wide, slamming into the guardrail on the side of the track. The impact was rather violent, leaving plenty of marks on the entire left side of the car. Zoom in on what the driver is doing and you’ll see some sort of a scene taken from an air/space battle movie, where a pilot struggles to land a machine with serious battle scars. Fortunately, the guy manages to manhandle the damaged GT 86, bringing the car to a halt without a second impact.

Aside from that, they may be a bit of extra damage... We’re talking about stuff like the airbags or the wheels, which require a tad more than just an alignment job. In fact, the car probably needs a new steering box, which isn’t the least expensive of hardware bits. Alas, the rear wheel on the driver’s side is out of place too.

As the GT 86 racecar rental is being taken away on a platform, you can see the costly damage. How costly? The maximum insurance excess for the thing is EUR 8,900 ($11,447 at current exchange rates), a bit more than the cost of hitting the “reset” button in NFS.

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About the author: Andrei Tutu
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In his quest to bring you the most impressive automotive creations, Andrei relies on learning as a superpower. There's quite a bit of room in the garage that is this aficionado's heart, so factory-condition classics and widebody contraptions with turbos poking through the hood can peacefully coexist.
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