Roland Linder bought the car after the crash and burn. The owner of the car before hand as far as I know is OK.
I have no dog in this hunt, but when a man makes, or fails to clarify, inaccuracies about claims made (even if only on his behalf by someone else), it's tantamount to lying and calls his very credibility into question. Ask Richard Blumenthal. CW
I know it all kinda fell apart for Roland when no one could find his name associated to Le Mans car racing, I'm sure we found the Le Mans motorcycle racing references. I don't remember honestly.
I was at the racetrack (Seattle International Raceway - now Pacific Raceways) the day this happened and saw it with my own eyes. Too bad this was before the era of camera phones, or I'm sure we'd have more photos. The car belonged to a then (and now former) Microsoft employee, Darryl Savage. Darryl is a great guy, and an extremely experienced on-track driver. In his words, the car just got away from him when the turbos lit up on the exit. He smacked the wall pretty hard, the fuel tank ruptured, and the car caught fire immediately. Darryl and his passenger both got out of the car very quickly and safely, and then stood a safe distance away. There was no time to get any sort of fire crew to the car in time. We all just stood there and watched it burn. I was glad my friend was alive, but sick to my stomach that his car was a smouldering heap. The memory of this day is why I have a halon system in my F40, and why I'm toying with the idea of replacing the fuel tanks in my F40 with the euro bladders.
Thanks for sharing an eyewitness account! It certainly confirms the report I read. There are in fact a whole series of images from after the accident, some very graphic. In the top one, note how the sheer force of the accident has sheared the spokes of the wheel from the rim! Even the rim is shredded! Thinking about it, any day you go to the track with your F40 and come home with nothing is a really bad day. At least they were unharmed. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
BY the way I should add that given the severity of the damage, its great that ANY kind of F40 has been rescued from this wreck.
Yeah, I've seen all the "after" photos. You can almost smell it looking at those shots. By "more photos" I meant that if this were to happen today, a wide assortment of camera phones would have likely captured a pile of "during" photos and videos, and they would have been on websites and YouTube within minutes of the crash. While (like most creatures with testosterone) I enjoy images of something as exciting as a car crash, I think any that involve serious injury or death should be respectully filed away from public consumption. Knowing that Darryl and is passenger got out OK is why these photos don't bother me... beyond the sick feeling in my stomach of seeing an F40 in such pain.
It looks to me like it hit the wall at the passenger rear side going backwards. Is that the way it happened? Look at the suspension and wheel damage, and both are pushed into the fuel tank..
Frankly that's the point. What would some perfer, that it be left like that? Ferrari itself has put back together an Enzo that looked a LOT worse than that. What Roland did was good enough for the Lawn at Cavallino. There was never any question as to exactly what it was as Totally rebuilt by Roland as an "LM" "Homage" or what had happened to it and the state it was in after the fire.
As I remember it, he was coming out Turn 9, which is a right-hander that exits onto the front straight. "Turn" 10 didn't exist back then. The car started to oversteer clockwise (probably due to the boost coming on strong before the steering wheel was straight). I don't know exactly what Darryl did to try and correct, but the result was the car quickly oversteering counter-clockwise and slamming the right rear corner into the left-side wall of the front straight. This is a tricky part of the track, since it's right where the drag strip meets the road course. It's bumpy, and grip is variable. BTW - those photos weren't taken at the exact spot of the crash. The car was towed to that location later, and the photos were taken a few days after.
There -was- a website of this aftermath for a while in the earlier days of the interweb, I remember reading it. It was entitled something like 'Death of a Legend'. Pretty sure it's gone now.
This is what I recall.....a comment from JRV........ "Make sure you have the steering wheel straight, when the boost kicks in..." As if I was ever going to get a chance to use THAT tidbit of information.....LOL! It was right after he had cleaned the stale fuel from G. Foreman's stored car, and redone the ruined cats....
Fo sho! At the end of the front straight at Portland Int'l Raceway, there's a 93 degree right turn (Turn 1) followed by an almost immediate 127 degree left turn (Turn 2). To get the quickest speed through T2, I have almost full left lock dialed in on the steering wheel to get the car rotating to line up the apex. I don't MASH the gas pedal, but I try to get it all the way down to the floor as quickly and smoothly as I can, just prior to T2's apex, and then I hold my breath during the turbo lag, hoping it won't magically kick in earlier than normal, and that I'll have time to unwind the wheel enough before the afterburners light up. As long as the boost level and RPMs are consistent every time that I come out of T1, it always works out fine. But there's always a red blinking light that goes off in my brain each time at T2 that says "HEY, YOU $*&%-ING MORON! DO YOU $%*&-ING REALIZE THAT YOU HAVE FULL LOCK IN A $*&%-ING F40 WHILE YOUR $%&*-ING GAS PEDAL IS PUSHED ALL THE $%*&-ING WAY TO THE $*&%-ING FLOOR?"
I don't think they can MAGICALLY kick in early....LOLOLOL! And JRVs 'gone on" and not here to ask!!!!
LOL. I try to reassure myself every time by telling myself that too, but the red light still blinks anyway.
The VIN That's all that's really required (and sometimes, not even that...) Actually, there was a pretty decent article about it in an older Forza.
He had to rebuild the frame, and go from there... Quite a bit of fabrication! It really picked up momentum when he found an OEM crate motor.....purchased by a speculator who found the demand for them was low....IIRC it sold for $40K or so..... Image Unavailable, Please Login
Darth550, I don't know what your problem is with Roland, but I can attest that he is a gracious, honest, and wonderful person. Those of you who have read my other posts know exactly how I feel about "kit" cars - even the ones like the GTOs that are built on the chassis of other Ferraris. But that is not what Roland did. He took a genuine F40 that was almost completely destroyed and rebuilt it. While purists can go back and forth about whether there is any degree of accuracy to his personal specs, or what it should be called, the bottom line is that this man put a totalled F40 back on the road, in the form of a truly fantastic one-off supercar, and that deserves praise. I made a mistake a few years ago by repeating something I had heard - from someone other than Roland - that the car was re-built to LM spec. I should never have repeated something that had not been substantiated by the man himself, and for that I apologize. Frankly, it seems that many of you want to seize upon anything that Roland has to say and use it against him. Roland didn't have to come here to lay the rumors to rest; he chose to do so. Your continued attacks make you look rather spiteful and petty. As Roland said, this car is the realization of a dream for him. Isn't that what Ferrari ownership is all about for most of us? Honestly, guys, why the hostility?
