Chris Mies’s high-speed collision at Bathurst highlights an overlooked danger of track tests
Spare a thought for poor Chris Mies, the man who had assorted pieces of kangaroo hurtle through the windscreen of his Mustang GT3 at the recent Bathurst 12 Hours.
The German driver’s overalls and helmet, never mind the destroyed front end of his car, were covered in viscera. In the murky morning light of the pits he looked like he had stepped off a medieval battlefield.
He had vomited trackside after the lap-three incident and later told an interviewer that even two showers hadn’t fully removed the stink of the animal from his nostrils.
It’s a pretty awful, potentially traumatic thing to hit any animal with a car, let alone something the size of a kangaroo at 152mph in what should be a secure environment. And it could’ve been a lot worse.
For one thing, if Mies had been driving not a Mustang, with the unending bluffness of its V8-filled snout to absorb the blow, but a Porsche 911 or one of the mid-engined cars, he would have been far more exposed, to horrific effect.
Watching the fallout also reminded me of a chat with a friend who worked in Australia for years. He said the problem with collecting ‘big reds’ weighing 85kg or more was they got lodged in the windscreen and would shred people to ribbons attempting to kick their way to freedom.
I don’t want to single out Bathurst. Even in Formula 1 there was a dog on the track as recently as 2020, in Bahrain. But it should probably do a better job when it comes to separating kangaroos and racing cars, even if it’s very difficult to stop large mammals with powerful legs from going where the hell they want.
Just ask Cristiano da Matta, the 2002 CART champion, who was left in a month-long coma after a deer sprang onto a perfectly clear section of track at Road America during a test session.
A similar thing had happened to Stefan Johansson at the 1987 Austrian Grand Prix. Granted, you can’t do much about birds. Alan Stacey was killed in his Lotus at Spa in 1960 after one flew into his face.
This was the era of open-face helmets, when you couldn’t headbutt the thing, as MotoGP rider Andrea Iannone, in an act of instinctive thuggish virtuosity, once did to a seagull at Phillip Island (seriously, what is it about Australia?).
An animal strike isn’t something we road testers routinely worry about when driving cars on the road in the UK, although for people who cover as much as 60,000 miles annually, perhaps we should.
In the UK each year there are around 70,000 collisions involving deer, and that figure has grown sharply in recent years. Among the reasons cited are our milder winters, leading to greater populations, which then encroach more on urban areas.
They’re mostly roe deer, weighing all of 25kg, but hitting one is still a big shunt. Which puts Mies’ collision into context.
At Horiba MIRA things are different. Speeds are much higher than on the road and, because there are long periods of quiet on certain sections of the facility, wildlife can be lulled into a false sense of security.
In fairness, the place is generally well protected from animals, and users are diligent in radioing through to track control if anything is spotted so that it can be shooed away. But occasionally you will see a muntjac on the grassy inside of the return apron of the mile straight. They’re sweet little animals and relatively dinky, but my thought is always the same: just stay right there, you gland-headed little bastard.
The thought of collecting one of these daredevil deer at the climax of a timed standing kilometre fully 184.5mph in the recent Lamborghini Temerario test sends a shiver down my spine. Especially in a Caterham.
The other place at MIRA where we used to be on alert for wildlife was the first of the two big parabolic bends of the dry handling circuit. It’s no longer a problem, because our old track layout has been kiboshed by an array of solar panels, but this bend used to be a favourite congregating place for crows.
Like all corvids they were switched on and knew that cars had to be avoided, but sometimes, on a timed lap in something freakishly quick, you would swoop in out of nowhere, clip one unawares and off it would limp, to be taken that night by a fox.
I absolutely hate this kind of occurrence and carry it around with me for days.
So my thoughts really are with poor old Chris Mies, not just the unlucky kangaroo which, being hit at such colossal speed and by such a mallet of a racing car, surely knew very little about it. As for Mies, they will burn his overalls and power-wash his Mustang, but the smell of the ordeal will linger.
