To give you an idea of the calibre of person who wins the annual Darwin Award, the 1994 winner died when he was crushed by the Coke machine he was tilting towards himself in an attempt to obtain a free drink from it. The 1995 winner was, if we are using the term loosely, a driver.
When the Arizona Highway Patrol spotted a mashed pile of smouldering wreckage embedded in the side of a cliff, the damage was so great that the vehicle was completely unrecognisable. But from the scale of destruction, they thought it to have been a plane crash. They were wrong; it was a car.
It took a long time to work out how a car had been so thoroughly destroyed, but investigators eventually pieced together the story.
The driver had somehow managed to obtain a Jet-Assisted Take-Off unit, known to the US Air Force as a JATO. JATOs are used to give heavy military transport planes an extra ‘push’ to assist them in taking-off from short runways. They are very simple devices: they’re just solid fuel rockets which, once ignited, provide a great deal of thrust for around 30 seconds before burning themselves out. (The solid fuel boosters used to launch the Space Shuttle are essentially just very large JATO units.)
Having obtained the JATO, the driver drove out into the Arizona Desert, found himself a long straight road and attached the JATO to his Chevy. He them jumped in, got up speed and pressed the ignition switch.
What happened next is a mixture of accident investigation, forensic analysis and speculation. But it went something like this.
The driver ignited the unit approximately 3.9 miles from the crash site. This much is known, as the rocket melted the asphalt on the road. Assuming that the JATO unit functioned according to specifications, it would have reached maximum thrust within approximately five seconds. At this point, the car would have been travelling at a conservative 350 mph. The Chevy would have maintained this speed for a further 20-25 seconds. The G-forces experienced by the driver would have been roughly equivalent to those experienced by fighter-pilots using full after-burners.
The car remained on the road for 2.5 miles. At this point the driver applied the brakes. Modern car brakes are extremely efficient, but they are not generally designed to slow a vehicle travelling at 350 mph against the continuing thrust of a solid-fuel rocket. The brakes melted and the tyres shredded, leaving investigators a handy marker for the point at which the brakes were applied.
The braking was not entirely without effect, however, for it is at this point that police believe the car became airborne. The car climbed gently through the air for a further 1.4 miles. We know this because the impact point was in a cliff face at a height of 125 feet above ground level.
The cliff-face was solid rock, but the wreckage still managed to produce a blackened crater three feet deep.
Very little of the wreckage or driver were recognisable, but investigators did manage to isolate a few items. Fragments of bone, teeth and hair were found in the crater, and both fingernail and bone slivers were extracted from a piece of plastic believed to have once been a steering wheel.
