Editor’s Note – You might want to turn your volume down before watching the video, as there are a couple of shouted F-bombs. Fairly warned ye be, says I.
Mulholland Highway, in Los Angeles’ Santa Monica mountains, is home to one notorious section of twisted pavement called “The Snake.” One curve in particular has been called “the most crashed corner in Southern California” for good reason – the hairpin U-turn dubbed “Edwards Corner” sees so many incidents that photographers, including YouTuber Ken Snyder, better known online as RNickey Mouse, routinely camp out there waiting for the inevitable.
Mulholland’s challenging tarmac draws hordes of motorcyclists, drivers of exotics and sports cars, and pelotons of bicyclists year round, with the two-mile stretch of The Snake a prime attraction. In Snyder’s video (one of dozens he’s shot at Edwards) from 2010 shown above, we see what happens when the driver of a LS2 GTO gets in over his head on the 180-degree, constant-radius, on-camber turn.
From the very start, he’s in trouble, running wide at the beginning of the turn and almost brushing the guardrail, but after correcting his line and getting out of understeer mode, he stomps on the gas and ends up oversteering on the exit, sliding across the opposite lane and off the road to the left.
Unfortunately, a group of parked motorcycles sheltering in the lee of a photographer’s pickup truck are in the path of the careening Pontiac. Cut to a shot of the aftermath, with bikes knocked down the hillside, and very NSFW words being shouted by one of their riders.
At least nobody was physically injured, and perhaps the GTO driver learned a lesson about not getting into a situation when you run out of traction, talent, and ideas on public roads. If you have an hour or six to kill, Snyder’s YouTube channel is full of videos from Mulholland – some that don’t even feature crashes!