Acting a fool on public roads seems to have become all the rage as coronavirus has lightened up traffic worldwide. We’ve seen crazy roundabout crashes, Autobahn speeds on U.S. highways, more than Autobahn speeds on the actual Autobahn, and all manner of stunting on the nearly abandoned streets. One man in Ontario found out that the police are still around, even when nobody else is, when he was clocked driving his Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat in a fashion that we’ll just call “ignorant of local laws.”
Handily, they had a blowout as they flew past a cop and didn’t force the local PD into a risky chase.
The lime green, 707-horsepower Challenger Hellcat was clocked just after midnight Saturday morning, traveling roughly 168 miles per hour. For reference, that’s nearly 100 mph over the posted limit. The Ontario Provincial Police said in a Facebook post that the Mopar’s tire blew just as it passed the cruiser, which caused the driver to stop in a fit of sparks and smoke.
Amazingly, nobody was hurt and the car sustained little damage in the incident. When all was said and done, the driver picked up charges for driving stunts, careless driving, and driving with cannabis readily available.
His Hellcat was impounded and he lost his license for seven days, but neither of those consequences came anywhere close to what could have happened after losing a tire at nearly 170 mph. In fact, it’s surprising that the only damage to the car—other than the tire and wheel—was its rear bumper, which appears to have been torn off by the tire.
With this high-speed mishap, the driver joins a sizable club of Hellcat owners turned delinquents. This most notably includes the guy who hustled his Challenger to 198 mph on public roads, putting more modest speed-limit-doubling hooligans to shame.
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