An Australian property developer escaped without injury after his Ferrari SF90 broke into two pieces in a crash on the Gold Coast, an outcome that has drawn as much attention for what the wreckage says about the car as for the driver’s survival.
Sam Gordon was behind the wheel of the hybrid supercar, worth about $1 million, when the collision tore the vehicle apart. The wreck left the Ferrari separated into major sections, a sight severe enough that the driver’s condition became the immediate question. Gordon walked away.
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The severity of the damage and the absence of injury are not the contradiction they appear to be. On a car like the SF90, the two are connected.
The SF90 is built around a carbon-fibre passenger cell engineered to stay rigid under extreme loads. Around that cell sit front and rear crash structures designed to do the opposite. Their job is to deform, absorb and dissipate impact energy rather than pass it along to the person sitting inside.
In a severe enough collision, those sacrificial sections can tear away entirely. That is what a car splitting in half often looks like from the outside. What matters structurally is whether the survival cell holds its shape, and in this case it did. The forces reaching the driver were reduced accordingly.
The design logic runs counter to instinct. A vehicle that survives a crash largely intact has transferred that energy somewhere, and in a high-speed impact, that somewhere is the occupant. Modern supercars are engineered to break in a controlled, predictable sequence, spending the car to spare the driver.
Photographs of destroyed exotics tend to circulate as evidence of waste or recklessness. In this case, the wreckage also serves as evidence that the engineering performed as intended. The Ferrari absorbed a violent impact, came apart along the lines it was built to come apart along, and kept its passenger compartment intact.
The car is a total loss. The driver is not.
Images Via: onlyforluxury
Source
Elizabeth Puckett 
Shawn Henry