Testing, testing

Spare a thought for poor Chris Mies, the man who had assorted pieces of kangaroo hurtle through the windscreen of his Mustang GT3 at the recent Bathurst 12 Hours. The German driver's overalls and helmet, never mind the destroyed front end of his car, were covered in viscera. In the murky morning light of the pits he looked like he had stepped off a medieval battlefield. He had vomited trackside after the lap-three incident and later told an interviewer that even two showers hadn't fully removed the stink of the animal from his nostrils.

- RICHARD LANE

It’s a pretty awful, potentially traumatic thing to hit any animal with a car, let alone something the size of a kangaroo at 152mph in what should be a secure environment. And it could’ve been a lot worse. For one thing, if Mies had been driving not a Mustang, with the unending bluffness of its V8-filled snout to absorb the blow, but a Porsche 911 or one of the mid-engined cars, he would have been far more exposed, to horrific effect.

Watching the fallout also reminded me of a chat with a friend who worked in Australia for years. He said the problem with collecting ‘big reds’ weighing 85kg or more was they got lodged in the windscreen and would shred people to ribbons attempting to kick their way to freedom.

I don’t want to single out Bathurst. Even in Formula 1 there was a dog on the track as recently as 2020, in Bahrain. But it should probably do a better job when it comes to separating kangaroos and racing cars, even if it's very difficult to stop large mammals with powerful legs from going where the hell they want.