Randy Pobst's DISASTROUS Tesla crash at Pikes Peak

when the car's in the air stability control can't help much i love pike's peak and i have now been up to that race six times i i just got a phone call out of the clear blue from a company called unplug performance that does suspension and body modifications on teslas and i had done an electric track day with them with tesla model 3s which actually happen to be pretty darn fast if you have not driven a tesla you don't know how powerful these things are so i was all for it i'm i want to do the pikes peak hill climb and i was on a podcast with ben shafer who is the uh co-owner of unplugged and i said to him hey we ought to get that plaid model tesla tesla had a super high performance car that they wanted to set a lap record with at the nurburgring and they called it the plaid which is another kind of tesla joke from the movie space balls when they when their spaceship went super fast they called it plaid and i love that sense of humor so i said we should get the plaid model s and run that at pikes peak ben said well i'm not sure that that can happen i don't think that can happen he said but we could maybe build a car for that and i'm like oh really and that's what happened in a short space of time unplugged bought a brand new tesla model 3 performance put a roll cage in it stripped it out as light as possible lightweight lexan windows carbon wide body all these parts they sell by the way so we go to pikes peak we're all excited i'm i'm not gonna do any of the pre-practice that they have at pikes peak but i will drive the car at laguna seca a week before the race when it's a brand new fresh build and at laguna seca run the car return what is the fastest time by a production electric car beating the plan at the time now as i said this has rapidly escalated since car handles fantastically they're all wheel drive they're smooth and powerful and they're unbelievable off tight corners next we go to pikes peak now after six events i'm starting to pick out apexes and not just what's the next corner gonna be which was my big mistake last time so we go to qualify and run the car and there's a little trouble with electric cars in that they have the most power when they have the most battery so every time you run an electric car it's got less battery it's going to be a little bit slower the the model 3 keeps most of its power for the first 20 of its battery life and these runs were i think two and a half minutes on the bottom section made a run wow the car was fantastic we were on used michelin slicks that i think are fronts off of the porsche gt3 cup cars and man they work great you put tire warmers on them warm them up real good took off the time was good i loved the car handled so well never did anything untoward it's just you can't turn the stability control all the way off and that's annoying because in the corners you can feel it going the brakes are just cutting it back and and that's the last thing you want in a hill climb we qualify really well the time is fantastic we're ahead of a whole lot of 600 800 horsepower cars with the that are experienced hill climbers and all that because the car is that good i'm looking at the results i'm like we got a good shot at winning this i didn't really think we were going to win anything in a tesla so everything's looking good as we go into day two day two for us is the top section that starts at devil's playground which is about 13 000 feet and uh the bumps are worse this year every so often they try to fix them and it's been a couple years since they tried to fix it and and they're bad and i've i've recognized it and on day one some of my friends were running like in the top section i think david donahue was up there in a porsche david donner and a rs club sports is what these guys are running and we're not that far off them so the car's great they said oh randy be careful the bumps are best but there's this bump in bottomless pit all the corners have names bottomless pit boy that one's a lot worse you gotta look out for that one and i practice a lot by watching an in-car video by another friend of mine named mike skein who's run there several times and coming into bottomless pit he hits the corner and gets all loose and almost spins this thing i even teased him about it like hey i study your video mike thank you uh boy you almost lost it there in bottomless pit he's like oh well yeah you know and um he won by the way but so we're lining up we borrowed tire warmers for a little bit but it wasn't a real deal before i got in the car ben shaffer the owner of unplugged pulls me aside he's like okay randy we you qualified really well we're way ahead of everybody else which we are and he says so you know take take it easy and i uh yes sir you betcha and we pull up to the line and of course in the back of my mind it's like yeah this is an electric car and we can't charge it and every run it's going to get slower but i had no intention of going fast under the conditions and they go green we take off first sweeper i'm kind of careful gentle nothing crazy second sweeper is one of these blue sky 80 miles an hour even taking it easy it's 80 miles an hour full on race speed it's a hundred mountain on one side blue sky on the other side second corner yeah okay we're good bro wait a minute there's no exhaust noise we accelerate all you can hear is the rocks pounding on the body sounds like a hail storm in a tin shed and so we go down we're heading for the next corner i'm cool we're good everything's fine the car has not put a wheel wrong anywhere i've driven it ever i have not driven the car over a big bump ever yet and so we're heading for bottomless pit and i get up to about 115 i know that bump's there i know it's rough i know what i'm doing i got this so i break a little extra lay it in the corner real gently hit that big bump boom like this it goes down hard comes out sideways and i'm like wow didn't expect that this car has never moved before plus i'm thinking where's that stability control that was pissing me off yesterday why are we even sideways well when the car's in the air stability control can't help much so we're sideways no problem i do this all the time i whip the wheel in there and catch that slide steer into the skid then there's a second coming with car control this is something that i love to coach on because it's so important for those of you that like to drive fast and you when you correct where's the wheel well it's turned a lot if you catch the slide you got to straighten it back out part of the reason this thing got so sideways too as the tires are cold i'm just not being as careful as i should have been huh by the i mean the evidence is me sideways i try to correct it and and the electric assist is a little lazy it's like through molasses for a moment it's like well that's all it took that was all she wrote you know you either there are nails in the coffin that was the last one and i was like oh and instead of going this way we are now going this way now we're going the wrong way in a hurry well my i was running about 68 when this all started 68 miles an hour which is not crazy but it got sideways now i'm going the wrong way off to the side and i'm trying to bring it back in but you know cold tires dirty road first run of practice don't push hard in your first run this was the third corner i saw that morning slowing down all i can but we're still running about 40. but it's a glancing blow there's a beautiful stone wall there that was probably built in the 30s by roosevelt's uh parks program to stimulate the economy in the depression i'm not kidding it's probably that old and you know why they call it bottomless pit well same reason the wall's there on the other side of that wall is the bottomless pit well i just skimmed it but car hits it hard it's in the air everything's hard at pike's peak then it it heads into a ditch and i'm already depressed i'm not scared i don't get scared in crashes i get depressed i'm like i am wrecking this car and ben's words are ringing in my ears and so we slam off that wall and we land in a ditch and the car whips around and we have really broken up all four corners bodies looks pretty good but the wheels have taken the blows and that car is crashed and i still feel so bad about that it's terrible i'm with the owner and we're going around the car looking at everything that's broken oh man oh man it's hurt bad in fact the worst thing we noticed that the uh the mounts on the rear electric motor were broken off at that moment it looked very dark this was before i got ben shafer hooked up with joe brenner joe was like coming down from the heavens on a shaft of light he said because he had access to this body shop uh euro cars and they had tesla trained body techs what ben did was he bought another car another tesla model 3. he bought it from tesla they had one in denver and some some tesla guys brought it down and they helped i mean it was everybody came together they basically replaced everything under the car by saturday morning they're aligning the car i think we might get back in this race and the pikes peak hill climb officials are going to let us because we only we did qualify but we didn't practice the other sections but uh i'm like i don't need no stinking practice but i am going to slow down a little bit bottomless pit i'll slow down there it appeared that we were good that we were ready everything worked it was really exciting to think that we're going to actually get to race this same car well with what but they changed everything under the car except the battery the battery is the length of the car they they had testing machines to plug in and the battery tested okay and it made good power in the practice runs but it did seem to to show red on its temperature pretty quick there's a display on the dash right here on that giant tesla screen we still had that in fact you had to to run the car you had to have that screen we get to the start line everybody's applauding the car's ready i'm ready i'm going to be a little bit careful but usually once i once i go i don't think about that stuff anymore i i my brain just sets into race mode and i just do what i do and 99 of the time it turns out great one percent of the time stuff like this happens so we leave the line and the car's rocking but we're running these hoosier slicks we decided to run a different tire uh we had a super trick hoosier slick that we bought so the car feels a little wobbly i i can't quite figure out what's going on there but it rained the night before and the road was dirtier these are all things that happen at pikes peak it's just it's the beauty of it it's not a laboratory environment so a minute or two into the run the power is not what it ought to be they're about 450 horse with a lot of torque especially off the line do not drag race against a tesla you will lose and i look over and the battery is red like a minute and a half in well shoot we'd run 15 minutes at laguna flat out no problem in 95 degrees we had a little switch they said if it gets hot hit that switch and so i went for the switch which turns on more of the co2 it's not nitrous oxide and uh that didn't help either and so now we're going up the mountain but we're really half power and it's a hill climb the grade is as much as i think 20 percent in some places there are all these hairpin corners switchbacks total switchbacks perfect for an electric all-wheel drive car because of that low-end torque and put the power down so well so we go up and i'm doing the best i can but the straightaways are just endless a couple of times i'm like come on baby come on baby and i'm also concerned about even making it because i know something is wrong something's really wrong beautiful part of it is after that effort from the team 48 hours night and day buying a whole new car and just swapping parts that way he knew he'd have every single party needed a whole car ben's smart but guess what we made it we made it to the top which was job one and crossed the finish line car was great on the bumps with the rebound turned up and a little bit of tire temp no problem but that's why you're careful on your first practice run we'd like to thank dream car exchange for supporting the vinwicki youtube channel this month dcx is an enthusiast marketplace with auctions for amazing cars happening now we've got some awesome things planned with them over the next few weeks that i think you'll enjoy so please stay tuned but now browse on over to their site and see if your dream car is the next one across the block [Music]

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 1,304,390

Keywords: randy pobst, vinwiki, car stories, pikes peak, tesla, model 3, performance, unplugged performance, racing, hill climb, accident, crash, damage, vehicle history, salvage, rebuild, 2020, 2019, plaid, model s, record, electric cars, autopilot, stability control, lightweight, technology

Id: v3NJRgv8ThA

Length: 15min 31sec (931 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020