News of the Weird
Now with video! The pelican grief: Bugatti meets bayou in La Marque
If you're going to ruin your $1 million-plus car, you better get a million-dollar story out of it.
No running into a pole in a parking garage or getting rear-ended by a texting teen—too anticlimactic.
No fiery, speed-driven crashes, either—too cliché.
So in some respects, the unnamed owner of the ultra-rare Bugatti Veyron that plunged into a lagoon in La Marque is already a winner.
According to media reports, the Lufkin man was driving on the service road of I-45 South, heading to look at houses in Galveston when, after taking his eyes off the road to retrieve his cell phone, he looked up and was startled by a low-flying, only-slightly-less-rare brown pelican.
What happened next was a comedy of errors so implausible that had it been fiction, no one would have believed it: The car veered, the right tire hit the shoulder, and the car lost control and, with no guard rail at that point in the road, splashed into a salt-water lagoon 20 feet away.
For any driver, it would have been an exceptional bout of bad luck. But when your car is the fastest and most expensive production car in the world (with a 16-cylinder engine, 1,001 horsepower and top speeds of 253 miles per hour), one of only 15 in the United States and you bought it only a month ago, you are officially The Man with the Worst Luck in the World.
Ah, we all seek glory and so often veer right into notoriety. Here's hoping the spectacular story of vehicular skinny dipping buys him $1 million in consolation drinks.
