The big news around here this week was the death of local celebrity and star of the Jackass movie franchise, Ryan Dunn. I have not seen any of the Jackass movies and generally disliked the television show because it made me worry that my stepsons would get hurt emulating their reckless behavior. As details have come out about Dunn’s last night on Earth, the whole thing has hit me a little closer to home. He was drinking in a bar called Barnaby’s which used to be my watering hole in the mid-1990’s when it was called something else and was basically a blues and jazz club. I lived two blocks away at the time. He then went with his buddy to a Wawa convenience store that I use on a semi-regular basis and waited in the car while his friend purchased some sandwiches. After that, he traced back to the West Chester bypass, which is a nice straightaway with almost no traffic even during the day, and took his $100,000 black Porsche 911 GT3 up to an estimated speed of 135-145 mph before losing control, spinning out, and careening through a guard rail into the woods. Then it burst into flames.
His main problem, aside from his reckless speed, was that his blood alcohol was twice the legal limit. This was the result of drinking approximately three beers and eight shots over a four-hour period. And the police have vindicated the bar, bartender, and waiter because they did not know that fans were buying him drinks. Police speculate that drinks provided to Dunn at last call were spiking his blood alcohol level a half-hour later when he crashed.
I guess you can add free drinks to the perils of celebrity.
I don’t even know why I’m writing about this except that it’s been on my mind. I didn’t even know the guy existed before he died.
I guess I hope that some kids will learn a cautionary tale from his early demise. I’m guessing they never had a chance to eat those sandwiches.
I don’t know about you, but my banner ads really want me to watch the San Francisco Orchestra perform Mahler on PBS. It’s getting annoying.
Oddly enough, the side banner ad is asking me to buy a Backtrack breathalyzer and STAY SAFE.
I got that, too.
I knew of the guy and his “work” but not his name.
When I saw reports of his death I knew exactly where he did it (322 and Pottsville Pike) and the dead straight road.
Seemed I’m sure to be a good place to wind out his 911… until he put a wheel off and over-corrected at speeds he was almost surely unfamiliar with and untrained to drive, even when sober. The booze surely made it seem like an even better idea. All those “fans” buying him drinks surely made him feel invincible.
I’m glad for him that his “talents” and the American system allowed him to buy such a fine automobile.
He was a complete ass to not treat it properly. Destroyed among the finest examples of industrial design known to mankind. Not a Ferrari 458 or McLaren MP4-12C http://www.nationalpost.com/cars/Preview+2012+McLaren/4996523/story.html but the 911 GT3 is iconic and a lot less money.
And I’m glad that the dirtball didn’t hit another car or take more than the friend’s life he did.
He had a mom. I feel very badly for her. No mom ever gets over something like this.
In six months few will likely even remember his name.
Don’t forget that this wasn’t Dunn’s first drunk driving problem. And for all Margera’s crying earlier this week over Ebert calling Dunn exactly what he was, supposedly Margera once made a comment(just second-hand) that Dunn have a driving problem. Meaning that Bam Margera had an inkling that Dunn would go out the way he did.
It’s an obvious place to choose to open up the Porsche at 2:30 in the morning. There’s no traffic, the cops are over on Rt. 202, and it’s got a long straightaway. In fact, when I heard where he crashed I was having trouble figuring out how you could lose it on that stretch. But I’ve never driven that fast. Maybe 110 mph is the fastest I ever went. At 140 maybe you can wipe with just a little pull on the steering wheel?
From the location, he couldn’t have gone very far before losing control. He probably lost it on his initial acceleration. Unless, as CabinGirl speculated, he looped around and was coming the other direction.
He took out the support post on the guard rail. That’s not easy to do. It must have carved the car like a tuna can, right through the gas tank, I guess.
I guessing one or both possible bad things happened.
A car like that has enough HP to spin the rear wheels up through fourth and fifth gears even at 140 mph. Mash the gas and just drop the clutch between gears and back end may want to step out and come around. If you get a little behind in your steering you can find yourself weaving back and forth until you are too far behind to catch up and you lose it.
Jumping off the gas at that speed, or worse hitting the brakes, can also be the worse thing to do. But its just what inexperienced drivers do when they think they’ve run out of talent. Doing that throws the weight of the car to the front and off the rear wheels. If the back end was wanting to step out and come around in the first place, lifting or braking hard will just make it worse.
Now he may also have just drifted an bit and dropped a wheel off the shoulder. Maybe that happened because he was accelerated hard and the back end was getting twitchy or maybe he was just behind in his steering because he was drunk. Either way, getting it back on the pavement can require a pretty severe pull to the left to get over the lip of the pavement which then will require a big correction to keep it straight. At those speeds and especially drunk, it is not something you want to try without some practice.
Either way, I’ve seen these cars wreck at close to 200 mph and they are incredibly well constructed and strong. They can take a huge about of punishment, hold together and protect the driver. About all that was left of his was the under tray. That’s testimony to what a tree or trees can do. If you have a choice of hitting a tree or anything else, pick anything else. Telephone poles are way better. Nothing much tougher than a living tree.
what do you make of the dual skid marks? Are those the rear tires making a different path, indicating some kind of fishtail? Or are those older skid marks from a different accident?
The two parallel dark marks are almost certainly the front tires. The bias on brakes is set so the front brakes work harder and earlier than the back. That’s so the rear doesn’t lock up as weight transfers to the front under braking. That’s also why on your car you have to replace your front brake pads faster than the rears.
The third skid that is not parallel to the other two is likely from the left rear. I’m guessing the car was yawing to the right (that is sliding somewhat sideways as he was trying to make the exit). Centrifugal force rolled weight to the left side putting more pressure on that tire and causing it to lock before the right rear, which looks like it never lock — no skid mark there that I could see. That any rear locked is proof he was giving the brakes all he could.
The skid marks are absolute proof that the car was not going to turn. It would have been impossible to steer in that lock up.
He simply ran out of talent. I’d even hazard a guess that the drinks made him more likely to try this stupid stunt in the first place, but unless he understood performance driving at those speeds he would had ridden the brake all the way into the guardrail regardless.
So, basically, he was driving the thing way over 140 mph when he decided to try to exit. That’s insane. Even if possible for a trained race-driver, you don’t do that after a night of drinks with a passenger in the car. Jackass.
Depending on the gt3 he had it has a top speed of +/- 190mph. In the distance he likely went on the road he definitely could have been above160. It do 0-120 in 1/4 mile. But it has monster brakes. If he hit at 140 he srubbed some speed off first.
I went by the crash scene twice today. We had to get the car inspected and so we were headed that way anyway. We came up the same way as on the video and they had two cops there with the right lane coned off. There are a line of cars there, many from out of state. People have taken a sharpie that’s taped to the guard rail and have written hundreds of messages. One guy had climbed down there and found what appeared to be part of a taillight. I guess he’ll see what he can get on Craig’s List.
Actually seeing the site did not help me understand what happened. They have replaced the guardrail with six new posts. It’s hard to visualize what happened to the car but it definitely hit the rail with the right side of the car first (which makes me less sure he was trying to exit) and the slip along a bit before breaking through it or getting launched over it.
There’s bark missing from trees to the right of where the main body of the car hit the rail, so I think some large pieces of the car just went flying like shrapnel. And then there’s a swath of destruction, including a downed tree become you come 40 yards into the woods to a black spot where the fire occurred. It’s at the base of a tall but not overly thick tree. If you go there, all the teddy bears and flowers are up above the place the car came to rest, which is half a football field away from the skid marks. Basically, his car (or pieces of it) almost made it to the bridge.
Speaking of which, we came back from getting the car inspected by going over the bridge and there were maybe 20 cars parked up ahead of the bridge on Rte. 100. They were walking down that way.
It’s amazing how many people are coming to check it out. It was a legendary wreck, that’s for sure.
Ok if you are convinced he hit on the right side then here is theory #4. From the video below imagine doing that route at three times the speed in the dark and drunk. Or not drunk.
If you motor along following the shoulder line you will find it leads you straight to the exit. In fact it looks as if you need to move slightly to the left to stay on a route going straight.
And it look at if the exit is somewhat obscured by tree limbs.
At160 mph that would have been a hell of a surprise and he would have to make an instant decision to yank it left to stay on the road or right to exit. Locking it up he did neither.
Here’s my thinking on this. Take a look at this picture of the guard rail that was taken before it was repaired.
Now, the skid marks would indicate that he would have hit, or come very close to hitting, the rectangular end piece of the rail. But he didn’t hit it because that would have exploded the car on the spot.
Instead, he seems to have hit just to the left of the end piece and then, as you can see from the picture, he took out the the rail on the first six support posts. It’s hard to say where he went over the rail, but it wasn’t precisely where he hit it. You can tell that from where the swath of destruction begins in the woods (seen as the darkest part of the photo above).
So, even though the skid marks make it look like he’s in a failed turn that he didn’t quite make, the evidence from the rail and the trajectory of the damage makes it look like he was turning to the left at the end. In any case, if the left side had hit first, he would have probably broken through or flipped over at the point of impact, and not slid along the rail.
But, another curious thing is the bark missing from trees off to the right of the skid marks in a place where the car simply could not have gone.
It was an enormous impact. Hard to even imagine.
On your theory, it makes sense except for one problem. The skid marks begin in the left lane. That’s why it seems like he was attempting to turn because he locked up while traveling in the left lane and immediately started turning hard right.
So, either the exit came up on him faster than he expected and he hit the brakes and lost control, or (closer to your theory) he lost control while moving from the right lane to the left lane and then slammed on the brakes too hard and was just driven to the right by chance.
One other item of interest is the road itself. Not far behind the Rte. 100 bridge is the New Street crossing (a third of a mile according to Google maps and 25 seconds at normal speed), and then past that the road begins to wind. He knew this road and probably used it to stretch out his Porsche many times. Once you pass Rte. 100, you want to slow down fast anyway. This is both because you might encounter crossing traffic at New Street and because the straightaway comes to an end about a half to three-quarter of a mile down the road.
So, traveling over 150 mph, he would have had to hit the brakes about where he did if he had any hope of slowing down before getting to New Street, which a assume was only eight or nine seconds away.
It could be as simple as that.
Could be as simple as that. Many people dont appreciate that keeping a car under control in high speed braking is among the toughest skills in racing. Thats were the diffdrence in lap times comes between good and great racers is. The weight shifts forward amd the car beecomes unsettled. He could have just got behind in his steering.
That said the car has amazing brakes and he my not have needed to brake that early for the road up ahead.
As for the guardrail he probably pulled at it like a rubber band and it went bzck to its original spot. The ripped bark on the tree is proof he hit it.
OK one last bit of morbid analysis. Based on this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mndw6x291M&feature=player_embedded#t=3s better view of the skid marks, I’d say with greater confidence that the two marks that come together are from the front tires sliding sideways and the car rotated counterclockwise to the left. They track on top of each other once the cars is sliding sideways. The other mark is from the right rear which would have most of the load.
The narrowness of the skid is also a clue. That is simply the contact patch of the tire going sideways which is narrower than the width of the tire traveling forward.
Seeing where the skid started in the left lane I’d say he was in the right lane and turn really hard to the left. Really hard. If the skid marks didn’t start until the car was fairly sideways then he would have likely needed to be in the right lane just prior to the skid. Also, the 911 GT3 can make a hell of a turn even at 160 without spinning. It was a major panic response IMO.
Maybe there was a car on the off ramp that he didn’t see until the last second or he realized he was going way too fast, but it looks like he aborted the exit but did it too late and/or too hard.
The other possibility was he was really hard on the brakes knowing he had to stop up ahead and the car got light in the rear and he began to lose it. He wound up in the right lane, saw the abutment/guardrail ahead and simply over-corrected.
Actually, your last possibility sounds pretty spot on to me…the light at New Street/Sunset Hollow Road isn’t all that much farther up 322, made even closer by he speed at which he was traveling…
Actually, he might have decided he was missing his exit and tried to slow down to take it. Or, a deer?
This guy drove the route and you can see that it looks like he didn’t turn enough to make the exit, but he was also rammed on the brakes all the way to the end, which is not normal behavior on a straightaway.
Oh yeah that’s it. He was trying to make the exit.
Made a different classic mistake. You can’t brake and turn at the same time. If the front wheels are locked up, that is not rotating, they will not steer the car. Basic physics.
If he had simply let off the brakes, there is a real good chance a 911 GT3 could have actually made that corner. Huge mechanical and aero grip on that car. That on ramp looks tight and it isn’t a good view but 140 doesn’t look out of the question
But the inexperienced drivers brain says, “Game over, I want hit the reset button” and tells the foot to push the brake all the way to the floor while the car continues into the guardrail.
What he probably NEEDED to do was work the gas pedal to help turn the car by getting the rear wheel to push the car around and through the turn. But that requires practice before the brain will put the fear aside and hit the gas not the brake when it clearly thinks its about to die.
More likely, if they pay it any attention at all, they’ll do what they do whenever one of their own friends splatters him/herself all over the roadway or wraps car and corpus around a telephone pole: Carry on histrionically with tear-choked tributes, then go out the following weekend and get blitzed as usual.
I don’t know why you’re writing about this either. The only lesson kids will pick up is that being a jackass gets you a Porsche that you’re not smart enough to drive.
It’s probably because I need a break from Boehner, Canter, McConnell, Kyl, and goddamned Libya.
Well, it’s true there’s just nothing left to be said about Stupid Republicans.
So, how about those Phillies?
Also, too,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/25/nyregion/new-york-state-senate-to-vote-on-same-sex-marriage.html?_
r=1&hp
He killed his passenger. He’d been charged in the past with drunk driving and amassed a stack of speeding charges which would have resulted in license suspension for most people. He was, in short, an ass. It’s too bad he died and I feel great sympathy for those who loved him, but this guy took his own life for granted and didn’t care enough about other people’s lives or safety to take precautions so he could drink and not kill. He was a very rich man, yet he didn’t hire someone who could ferry him home after a night of drinking. Sounds like he didn’t think he needed someone like that. He was arrogant, believing the rules didn’t apply to him. It really is too bad that he’s dead, but his passenger is also dead, and two families, not one, are dealing with irrevocable loss. Two families are asking themselves how this happened.
I’ve represented hundreds of drunk drivers over the years. The vast majority are appalled that something like that even happened. They’re mortified that they did not exercise enough caution or good sense. They will never reoffend again. But there is another group, the repeat offenders, the Peter Pans who believe they can fly and think they should not be held responsible for any harm they have done. They are the narcissists and the screwups, the guys who never think of consequences. Mr. Dunn was an unfortunate member of the second group. If he’d survived this crash he would have gone out again as soon as he was able and done the same thing. I’ve had clients in wheelchairs from earlier accidents persist in such behavior until they died and usually took someone with them. That’s the type of guy Dunn appeared to be. RIP, but especially to his passenger RIP.
You are describing a classic alcoholic.
Hard to separate cause and effect. Booze creates poor judgment in the short term warps the brain and personality. But the brain and personality can prompt people to be a drink too. Chicken meet egg.
And yes, those people will wind up recovered, dead, institutionalized or in jail. No real other options.