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An automotive YouTuber’s dream weekend with Porsche-owning friends on the notorious Tail of the Dragon road turned into a nightmare when his 992 GT3 was taken out by a pickup truck crossing double yellow lines.
When the crash happened Adam LZ was driving along Deals Gap, a famous 11-mile (18 km) mountain pass at the the Carolina-Tennessee state line that’s hugely popular with car and motorbike fans, having already spent the previous day shooting a video there.
He was leading a convoy of member from the Smokies GT Group, a non-profit community of owners of high-end Porsche cars that raises money for good causes and says that his GoPro cameras were all deactivated at the time because he’d already filmed so much continue the previous day. That is pretty unfortunate for us and for insurance investigators, but we can just about see the disaster unfold from a camera fixed to one of the Porsches a few cars back in the convoy.
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And what we see is the white Chevy Silverado crossing the solid double yellow lines, apparently hoping to park in a pull-off area at the side of the road, but the driver has chosen a pretty terrible place to cross the oncoming lane because the road is curving away from her.
The GT3 takes a bad hit to the offside front corner, crushing the fender, smashing the headlight and front bumper, and pushing the front right wheel back towards the passenger compartment, instantly firing off a birthday party’s worth of crash balloons inside the cabin. The truck, meanwhile, exits the scene stage right, and ends up halfway down the bank. Fortunately, neither Adam LZ or his passenger were seriously hurt in the crash, the 911’s central structure remaining intact, though LZ was left with some nasty bruising on his arm. The GT3 is a mess though, and so, we imagine, is the truck driver’s standing with her insurance company.
It’s hard to gauge from the video exactly how fast the Porsche convoy is traveling at the time of the incident, but based on earlier footage they probably weren’t driving like your auntie June in her Corolla when they hit the S-bends. But the key fact here is that the truck driver crossed the yellow lines. It also occurs to us that this corner looks uncannily similar to the one where a Ferrari 488 Pista ended up on its roof almost a year ago.
We’ll have to wait to see what LZ’s insurance company wants to do with the 911, but replacing it won’t be easy. Not only was it a manual-transmission car, but it was a paint-to-sample order, and demand for GT3s is so high, Porsche can’t simply pop out another.