A Lamborghini and a Ferrari crashed in a high-speed road race in Beijing on Saturday as the seventh stunt-filled The Fast and the Furious movie opened in China, the latest luxury car accident to provoke controversy.
Pictures of the mangled wreckage of a lime green Lamborghini, a damaged red Ferrari and other high-performance cars in a tunnel in the Chinese capital emerged online yesterday following Saturday’s crash, which police said left one person injured.
A high-speed Ferrari crash in the capital in March 2012 killed the son of Ling Jihua (令計劃), a close ally of then-Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤). Two female passengers, one of them naked, were both injured.
Photo: AFP
The incident added to public perceptions in China of corrupt and high-living officials, and Ling has since been investigated for graft and dismissed from his post.
“What are their names? Who are their fathers?” one poster asked on Sina Weibo after the latest crash.
It happened at about 10pm, police said, during heavy rain, two hours before Furious 7 broke the record for midnight screenings on its launch in China, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
“Were they in a hurry to watch Furious 7?” one netizen asked.
A report by news portal Sina said at least one of the drivers was a student and that residents had complained about cars racing in the tunnel, which is near Beijing’s emblematic Bird’s Nest Stadium.
Beijing police drew derision from Chinese netizens for referring to the cars involved as green and red “small passenger-carrying vehicles.”
“These sure are valuable vehicles,” one poster wrote.
Lamborghinis sell for about US$800,000 in China and Ferraris for about US$500,000.
A 21-year-old driver crashed his Ferrari at high speed in the Chinese capital in February last year, killing a passenger and injuring another.
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