It was only a matter of time that a serious accident would happen, when a few rich guys participate in a car race on the roads of Europe. And on Wednesday in Macedonia one of the participating cars had an accident with an 67 year old, who died on the way to the hospital (Netzeitung.de on the accident – in German).
The race went on to Bratislava (Slovakia), where the race has been stopped. In Berlin the Police was already waiting to end the race. I am not sure if the organising company will learn from this and stop the race. Honestly, I really doubt it.
Obviously there is a lot of money to earn with this stupid race, when even big brands like Adidas (see my post “Gumball: Or What the hell is wrong with Adidas?“) are sponsoring the event. But not only did they sponsor the event. I just read at the automobil-blog.de (in German) that they had their own car in the race and even an own Gumball collection. The Gumball collection was available at jointherally.com, but this website seems to be deactivated since the accident has happened. The URL redirects to the main Adidas page.
The collection was supposed to be available at Foot Locker, but it seems like they are not allowed to sell it any more. Should the responsible team at Adidas finally have understood the problem of sponsoring such an event? I am interested in the official response of Adidas now. Just taking the collection from the market can not solve the problem. Due to the campaign many will connect the brand with this race. I still can not understand how anyone at Adidas could be so stupid to sponsor this whole event. You can get negative PR in any sports (doping, unfair behaviour, etc.), but in this case it was a car race that is illegal (at least in Germany) and the participants deliberately infringe laws and regulations. It was only a matter of time that this race would cause an accident.
But then, who cares about Adidas and this PR disaster: Someone had to die because a group of brainless guys who obviously do not know how to spent their money, thought it is fun to have a car race on official roads along with the normal traffic. Anyone with a little brain can imagine how this can end. Even when the guys have good control over their cars, a race in a group is still different. Participants will push each other to the limits, everyone wants to top the other.
So with all that money they seem to have: why don’t they just rent a formula one race track like the Nürnburg Ring and have fun their? Well, it is probably too normal.
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