As BTCC hero-turned-commentator John Cleland notes, “The man who designed that corner should be taken into a dark room and beaten,” he gets anybody with a pulse to pay attention. It seems that certain track designers don’t spend enough time driving themselves, and fail to fathom the demands of wheel-to-wheel racing and the temperaments of the drivers involved. At least, that incompetence has regaled us with one of the funniest crash videos of all time.

After the flag drops, the polesitter streaks away before he hits his BMW’s brakes as late as possible to avoid the melee any blockhead could see coming. As racers with be racers, the first few find it necessary duck, defend, and blitz three-wide into the tight hairpin of Motorsport Arena Oschersleben which requires one car, traveling alone, to slow to a relative crawl to pass through unscathed.

The dense field of touring cars compile into one massive blue-yellow blob, and like a school of clumsy, hot-headed fish, the cars begin to move as one solid entity. It’s hard to understand which is more absurd—that a track would be designed without any real foresight, or that a field of professional drivers wouldn’t agree to some truce to ensure a chaos-free first corner. Well, racers being racers, once that informal agreement was made, at least one would inevitably try his luck and cause the kind of pileup you hear people talk about in hushed tones. Sometimes, those pileups occur before the corner.

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