This past Friday night, as my team was preparing our MX-5 Cup car for Saturday morning's AER race at Road Atlanta, I saw a friendly face walking up to me in the paddock. "You remember me, right?" he asked. "We did that supercar coaching thing together a few years ago. At Hallett."

"Oh yeah," I chuckled, thinking about a weekend where I scared myself silly sitting next to about two hundred different drivers who were experiencing a "supercar" for the first time. "I can't believe we both survived that."

"Me neither," my friend replied.

"You still doing it?" I inquired.

"Hell no," he said, and we had a long, hearty laugh before getting back to the work of our race weekend. I didn't give the conversation any further thought.

About thirty-six hours later, according to news reports, a customer at "SpeedVegas" lost control and crashed the supercar he was driving. In the fire that followed the impact, both the customer and the SpeedVegas instructor in the right seat lost their lives. The name of the customer has not been released. The instructor was Gil Ben-Kely, a double cancer survivor who had made a career and a life coaching supercar renters in Las Vegas.

When I heard about the incident, my first reaction was surprise—not that another instructor had been killed in a rental, but that it had happened at SpeedVegas. Like their competitors at Exotics Racing, SpeedVegas had spent the time and money to create a purpose-built track for the "supercar experiences," one that was specifically optimized to reduce risk for drivers and instructors. I haven't driven the SpeedVegas track, but I've done an endurance race at the EXR facility and I have to say that I was very impressed. It would be hard to have a serious crash there; the track surface is surrounded with deep pea gravel. My race partner (and brother) Mark went off backwards into that gravel at maybe 90mph during our race; he came to a halt thirty feet off the track surface with nothing injured but his pride.

There are plenty of supercar-rental companies out there using traditional racetracks. Some of them are relatively conscientious; others can best be described as "fly-by-night." But all of them have one major problem in common; they're putting inexperienced, often incompetent drivers behind the wheel of 200-mph cars on tracks that weren't designed for the purpose. In many cases, they're using racetracks that were designed fifty years ago for the safety challenges presented by hundred-horsepower British sports cars, not modern mid-engined monsters with five or six times that kind of shove. It's a recipe for major injuries and major lawsuits.

When you move the party to a purpose-built facility, the safety picture becomes a lot better—but that doesn't mean that all the risk is gone. Don Salisbury, the veteran race-flagger and safety worker who is front and center in the growing instructor-safety movement, puts it like this: "With the speeds the latest street cars can achieve... running stock fuel tanks, and without the protection offered by rollcages and other safety equipment... this kind of deadly incident becomes more likely."

Don went on to explain to me how the "supercar experiences" out there are learning the same lessons that the SCCA regions learned thirty years ago, and the same way: through violent, sometimes deadly, crashes. "OSHA has been called in to investigate these deaths," he noted. "Expect some change for in-car instructing .... OSHA is less guided by 'acceptable losses' or 'financial settlements' than the CEOs of the for-profit event providers. I am sure a few track owners will have a higher level of concern, starting today. Insurance underwriters' heads are up too."

THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM IS THIS: STREET CARS, EVEN STREET SUPERCARS, AREN'T REALLY DESIGNED TO CRASH AT 150-PLUS MILES PER HOUR.
I think the heart of the problem is this: Street cars, even street supercars, aren't really designed to crash at 150-plus miles per hour. They're paper tigers of a sort, with performance that can match or exceed the fastest GT-class race cars but safety systems that are optimized for 45-mph crash testing. It's bad enough when a purpose-built racecar crashes at high speed, but at least the chassis and cage and driver environment is designed to mitigate the effects of that crash. Put a street car with three-point belts, a lot of glass, and no cage into that situation, and the results can be deadly.

The only way to fix the situation is to set these rental-supercar places up with the same kind of in-car crash-safety preparation that the best IMSA racers get. But not only is that not an absolute guarantee of safety, it's also a profit-killer for the companies that rent them. Their business model relies on being able to re-sell the cars afterwards at little to no loss. How else can you explain letting people drive a Lamborghini for $59 a lap, knowing that the car will swallow five bucks' worth of gas and wear out $2,000 worth of tires and brakes every day? If the cars had to be modified for safety, they'd be worthless on the Miami used-exotic lots afterwards. And then the prices would start to look like the costs that Lamborghini Super Trofeo teams pay per lap. Trust me, there's no profit in that.

What does all of this mean for you, the car enthusiast with a boarding pass to Vegas on your phone? Simple. You need to understand, and accept, that you are taking serious risks when you drive a rental car on the track. You'll have an instructor, and you might be on a groomed private track, and there might be EMS personnel nearby, but in the final analysis, the only person who can guarantee your own safety is you. Don't make the decision to rent lightly, and make sure you understand your capabilities as a driver before you do.

Speaking honestly, I think you'd be safer renting a Spec Miata or something similar and hiring a solid instructor to work with you on a safe, modern track. That's still something you can do in Vegas: EXR and a few other companies offer a purpose-built, fully-caged racer that offers you a much better chance if you do make it all the way through the gravel to a concrete wall. It's not nearly as exotic as driving a Ferrari at triple the speed limit, but it's plenty exciting, trust me. Ask my friends who quit supercar coaching but didn't quit racing: the best kind of story, or picture, is one that you're still around to tell.

Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a week.

What does all of this mean for you, the car enthusiast with a boarding pass to Vegas on your phone? Simple. You need to understand, and accept, that you are taking serious risks when you drive a rental car on the track. You'll have an instructor, and you might be on a groomed private track, and there might be EMS personnel nearby, but in the final analysis, the only person who can guarantee your own safety is you. Don't make the decision to rent lightly, and make sure you understand your capabilities as a driver before you do.