Ferreira, behind the wheel of the bigger, heavier Chevy, walked away with barely a scratch.

And somehow, Lucas survived, too. Barely.

On the third roll, Lucas’ seatbelt snapped, throwing him from the vehicle. A bystander, who happened to be in the right place at the right time, pulled Lucas clear of the wreckage and called an ambulance.

When paramedics arrived on the scene, Lucas wasn’t breathing and he had no heartbeat. He was rushed to the hospital in critical condition (in other circumstances, he probably would have enjoyed the high-speed race against time).

His lungs were crushed, and he hovered close to death in intensive care for the next two weeks. He pulled through, but had to spent several months convalescing in hospital.

“I spent some time in the hospital, and I realised that it probably wouldn’t be smart for me to be a race driver — especially after this accident,” Lucas told Starlog in 1981.

“Before that first accident you are very oblivious to the danger because you don’t realise how close to the edge you are. But once you’ve gone over the edge and you realise what’s on the other side, it changes your perspective.

“I was in a club with a lot of guys who were race drivers — one of ‘em went on and drove at Le Mans — and he eventually quit too because of the same thing. You see what the future is there, and you realise that you’ll probably end up being dead. That’s where most of them end up; it’s inevitable, because the odds are if you stay with it long enough that’s what will happen to you.

“And I just decided that maybe that wasn’t for me. I decided I’d settle down and go to school.”

Lucas enrolled at Modesto Junior College, where he substantially improved upon his mediocre high school grades while studying psychology, anthropology and philosophy.

He also began working as a photographer. Lucas had always had a knack for graphic art, and he combined that with his love of racing to begin taking stills of sports cars.

He happened to meet Haskell Wexler — later voted one of the 10 most influential cinematographers in history by the International Cinematographers Guild. A racing enthusiast himself, Wexler had a car built by a mechanic Lucas was working for at the time, and they became friends.

With Wexler’s encouragement, Lucas enrolled at the University of Southern California’s film school, where he could pursue the new love of his life.

“In a way movies replaced my love for cars,” Lucas told Film Quarterly. “Since I was about 12 or 13 I had this intense love relationship with cars and motorcycles; it was really all-consuming. After my accident, I knew I couldn’t continue with that, and I was sort of floundering for something. And so when I finally discovered film, I really fell madly in love with it, ate it and slept it 24 hours a day. There was no going back after that.”

Of course, it’s not exactly true that movies replaced Lucas’ love of cars. If anything, his two great loves supplemented each other.

One of the short films he made at USC, 1:42.08 — alternatively known as 1:42.08: A Man and His Car — was a visual tone poem depicting a Lotus 23 race car going at full speed.