Carbon Ceramic brakes on your $320,000+ supercar are worthless when you don’t give yourself enough distance to brake.
Darius Dobre, one half of the famous Youtube Duo, The Dobre Brothers, got his brother to film him driving triple digit speeds in his Lamborghini Huracan STO down the since-closed 75-80 Dragway in Monrovia, Maryland in reverse, from the end of the dragstrip to the starting line.
It all goes wrong when Darius brakes too late and overshoots the burnout box and into a fence past the starting line.
Check out the, in hindsight, embarrassing video below.
As mentioned, this is at the abandoned 75-80 dragway, a Monrovia, Maryland dragstrip that’s been closed since 2005. (Google Maps link here.)
As such the surface has not been maintained at all, road conditions not conducive to any kind of racing.
A quick search reveals the Dobre Brothers are no strangers to 75-80 Dragway having raced against the late Randy Tillim of Savage Garage earlier in 2021.
The Darius Brothers decide they’re going to go against each other in an out-and-back style race where they quickly head to the end of the drag strip, make a quick turn, and race back to where they started.
Darius friend Christian decides to ride shotgun with him.
As you can see in this screenshot, there’s sand and what looks like oil near the starting line of Darius’s lane, a fact the Dobre Brothers think little of which, of course, will bite them in the back.
Presumably, someone’s been there before, dropped some oil on the strip, and, in an effort to clean it up, dumped sand on the worst parts without then cleaning up their mess.
Darius guns it in his $327,000+ Huracan STO and easily makes it to the turnaround point.
He makes a somewhat slow turn and heads back to the start of 75-80.
Although Darius claims he hit 170 MPH headed back on his Instagram post, we can clearly see his digital speedo only ever hitting as high as 144 MPH.
Darius starts braking several hundred feet from the starting line.
He doesn’t slow down fast enough, overshoots the starting line, drives through all that slippery sand and oil, and continues through a fence near the start of the track before coming to an abrupt stop.
The Huracan STO suffers thousands of dollars in damage to the front and sides, a compromised cooling system as evidence by a damaged and leaking radiator, and at least one knocked off side-mirror.
According to Darius in the video, he broke too late.
Using Google Maps and landmarks from the video (three light poles away from the starting line) Darius started braking 605 feet away from where he crashed and 400 feet away from where he was supposed to stop.
I’ve tried various car stopping distance calculator sites (like this one) and most calculate that, at 144 MPH, you need at least 1,170+ feet to stop, that’s including reaction time, too.
1,170 feet is about four football fields long.
Granted, the Huracan STO has special Carbon Ceramic Brakes which would’ve, according to some cursory Googling, scrubbed a marginal amount of braking distance.
In other words, even with C.C. brakes, he still needed to stop way earlier.
Without knowledge of how fast they’d be going and not measuring out where’s a good place to start brakeing with some kind of margin of error, it’s safe to say this type of drag race was doomed from the start.
Driving fast is fun and, when done properly, taking all the risk mitigation factors into account, is relatively safe.
But when you start thinking that driving triple digit speeds down an abandoned drag strip is somewhat of a good idea, you’re already exposing yourself to way too much risk.