DOH!
Red faces as $500k supercar smashed
It was red faces all around after a $500,000 sports car was left upside down in a west Auckland ditch yesterday. The black McLaren was heard “screaming” on to the Northwestern Motorway before crashing about 1pm.
The car went off the road and into a barrier about 150m from the Pt Chevalier on-ramp on the city-bound side of the motorway, police said.
One person was taken to hospital with moderate injuries.
Local resident Jason Jones heard the accident unfold.
“I was mowing the lawns, all I could hear was Formula 1. It just ripped from beneath the bridge straight round,” he told the Herald on Sunday.
He heard the car “screaming” along, followed by “this big bang”.
“You could hear the car, it was just roaring. Man, I don’t know how fast that car was going, but man, it was going fast.” After hearing the crash, Jones went out to take a look.
At first he couldn’t see anything, but spotted police at the median barrier by the on-ramp and then saw the car, which had flipped. He said it was a black McLaren supercar, which sells for about half a million dollars. “The car’s totalled. It’s in a ditch and it’s upside down. It was unreal.”
One man was taken straight to a waiting ambulance and a second man later hopped in, Jones said.
He was not sure which man was the driver.
“They’re lucky to walk out of that.” Jones and another local joked that the totalled car was a “million-dollar view in Pt Chev”.
In December last year, a McLaren F1 car estimated to be worth $20 million crashed near Queenstown after appearing to spin off the road and into a ditch.
The driver, a 65-year-old Australian man, was understood to have received treatment for a sprained or broken thumb at a Queenstown medical centre.