”Night of Fire?” More like crash of morons.

As someone who enjoys a spirited drive as much as, if not slightly more than, the next guy, I can understand the desire to mash the accelerator pedal when you find a stretch of empty road ahead. It’s a temptation that only grows stronger if it’s late at night, and if you’ve got some hyper-paced dance music blaring through the speakers, for a few moments you might actually find yourself believing that you’re the star of Initial D, Wangan Midnight, or some other anime about underground street racing.

Take, for example, this Japanese Mercedes SL55 driver, whose dash camera footage was shared by Twitter user @dome_beat. While parked at a red light, with the Eurobeat blaring, a Toyota Aristo (renamed the Lexus GS for overseas sales) pulls up next to the Mercedes. With their competitive juices flowing, both drivers floor it as the light turns green. Exhausts howling, the cars surge forward in an impressive showing of their engineers’ talents.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t change the fact that both drivers are morons.

▼ The impromptu race starts at the video’s 15-second mark.

After pulling barely ahead, the Aristo, which starts in the outside lane, blinks its turn signal twice. As soon as that brief gesture of politeness is done, the Toyota pulls in front of the Mercedes, which is just a terrible idea. Making things worse is that the Mercedes driver doesn’t appear to make any effort to back off, plowing right into the Aristo’s rear corner and sending it spinning over the raised center divider before the SL55 itself coasts to a stop along the shoulder of the road.

As he sends the Toyota careening off camera, all the Mercedes driver offers is an irritated, “What’s with you, asshole?” Once his car comes to a stop, though, he gets a little chattier, shouting, “Shit! Look what you did to me!”

Online commenters have been quick to point out, collectively, how each driver was in the wrong.

“’Look what you did to me?’ Where does he get off talking like the victim when he’s the one that hit the other car? I can’t stand guys like this. He’s worse than a cockroach.”
“Who tries to muscle into a lane from half a car length ahead with two blinker flashes like that?”
“When two idiots meet on the road, an accident is going to happen.”
“More than the accident, I can’t get over the guy singing along at 0:10.”

This is the part where automotive enthusiasts would usually say “The street isn’t the place for this sort of thing,” and recommend the pair save such wannabe displays of speed for an official race course. Given how dumb these two drivers are, it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t be a danger to others there as well, though, so in this case I think the best outcome isn’t if they decide to take it to the track, but to stick to public transportation from here on out.

Source: Jin, YouTube/動画, Twitter/@dome_beat

Follow Casey on Twitter, where he’s wondering if a Mustang came by and ate some people after the video ends.