Seattle Driver Crashes Rental McLaren 650S on Wet Road, Blames Summer Tires
Would you believe the police have a different theory?
It's often said that inexperience can be an asset. Unfortunately, that doesn't really apply when driving someone else's 641-horsepower McLaren 650S on a rain-slicked highway, as a man who crashed the $265,000 supercar during a four-hour rental early Thursday morning found out.
Trooper Rick Johnson of the Washington State Patrol tweeted out a picture of the smashed 650S, which came to rest on the side of Interstate 5 in downtown Seattle at around 1:30 a.m. on Thursday after the driver lost control in a tunnel and spun out. While these sorts of late-night supercar crashes generally involve some form of impairment, Trooper Johnson wrote that this was simply a case of an inexperienced driver going too fast for the wet conditions.
And with a 3.8-liter twin-turbo V8 engine sending 641 horses to the rear wheels, there's no denying that the McLaren 650s can be a handful. But the driver, who reportedly rented the car for four hours earlier that night, has a different theory. According to KOMO News, he told police that he wasn't speeding and instead blamed the car's summer tires for letting go in the rain.
Those Pirellis might not be in the best shape, but the State Patrol pointed out that he was going fast enough that the McLaren bounced off both sides of the Convention Center tunnel before coming to a halt.
There are now more ways than ever to slide behind the wheel of someone else's supercar for a few hours—though as this cautionary tale shows, sometimes the experience will stay with you in more ways than one.
