On Sept. 30, there were a lot of firsts for Burlington’s James Burchill – firsts he’d rather not go through again.

The Burlington author/host/producer, known for his Smartcar Coffee Confidential show was the passenger in a Camaro that crashed head-on into the wall at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park, 40 minutes north-east of Toronto.

A camera inside the car captured the moment it happened:

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Burchill was filming an episode of his show with race car driver and instructor Kirk Robinson, who owns Robinson Automotive in Mississauga, when things took a turn for the worse. While he’s definitely worse for wear, he’s upright and walking today with no broken bones and no long-term injuries other than severe bruising and aches and pains.

“I feel like I’ve been hit by a car, definitely an experience not to be missed,” he said. “Feels like I got hit with a baseball bat to the chest.”

They were heading into the track’s fourth turn and as they went over the rise, the back of the car started “getting fishy and slipped out, slid right off the track and partially onto the grass,” Burchill told the Post. “He got the car back on the track, got it straightened out, but we were at the dangerous part of the curve, approaching it at 200 km/hr. We couldn’t make the turn, he figured, and if we tried, we would have hit (the wall) sideways and rolled it – potentially fatal.

“So he made the split decision to straighten the car, and we hit the wall full-speed, head-on. He saved my ass,” he added, noting he has nothing but good things to say about Robinson and his actions at the track, or the crash. “The media in me is like ‘I have this great footage,’ and I don’t regret it.”

Being a journalist at heart, Burchill managed to keep holding the microphone in his left hand during the entire event, and judging from the audio footage, he was still able to laugh even moments after the crash, which saw every air bag in the car - a Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 with 650 hp – deploy.