Chris Mies miraculously avoided injury after crashing out of the Bathurst 12 Hour following a collision with a kangaroo. The annual endurance race for GT and production cars in Bathurst, Australia, unfolded at the Mount Panorama Circuit in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Barely 20 minutes into the race, Mies’ challenge came to an abrupt end. Fresh from a class victory last month in the 24 Hours of Daytona, Mies – who was set to share driving responsibilities with Dennis Olsen and Broc Freeney – had been hoping to secure back-to-back victories in global competition. However, his No. 64 HRT Ford Mustang GT3 struck a kangaroo.
The race commenced in darkness, and Mies was running inside the top 10 when he collided with a kangaroo on the high-speed Conrod Straight.
The incident caused “irreparable damage”, according to Ford Racing. Mies’ severely damaged Mustang GT3 was unable to continue, though the two-time race winner managed to exit the car unaided. He returned to the paddock without injury.
“Unfortunately I hit a kangaroo, so the race is over,” the German driver said in a social media post.
“It’s a shame because the HRT Ford Mustang was really good. That’s the way it is. We are out of the race.”
HRT’s managing director, Ulrich Fritz, attributed the team’s premature exit from the race to an “unlucky situation.”
Speaking to Sportscar 365, he explained: “We hit a kangaroo that had just jumped on the race track after about 20 minutes. Nothing you can do about it at 245 km/h. Luckily nobody got injured, besides the animal.
“It’s just bad luck, you can’t change it. All we can do is come back stronger next year. We would have loved to show more here on the Mountain.
“There were so many fans supporting us, and it would have been great to give something back. But this is the name of the game. Racing is sometimes cruel.”
However, HRT wasn’t the only team affected by the incident. Several other vehicles, including the No.32 WRT BMW M4 GT3 EVO driven by Kelvin van der Linde and Jayden Ojeda’s No. 6 Tigani Motorsport Mercedes-AMG GT3 Evo, also collided with the kangaroo.
The BMW managed to carry on despite damage to its right-front bodywork, whilst the Mercedes-AMG made numerous pit stops in an effort to repair the front of its car.