Lost Tesla Drives Wrong Way Onto Hot Track During Live Race Broadcast

“In a world of what the F, I present to you, what the F. This may be the biggest F I’ve ever what’ed,” the race commentator said during the live broadcast of an AFM event at Buttonwillow last weekend. A red Tesla appeared to have wandered onto a hot track—against race traffic—befuddling and infuriating track workers. We can laugh now since nobody died, but man, what a screw up.

Last weekend was the fifth round of AFM’s motorcycle racing season. Multiple classes ran at Buttonwillow in Kern County, California, on October 25 and 26. The events seem to have gone off without incident, with the exception of this wayward red Tesla Model Y sneaking onto the track, probably looking for a charging station, as the real-time commentator speculated.

You might as well just watch the clip. The car shows up around the 07:23:40 mark of a nine-hour broadcast, during the Middle Weight Super Sport Wave 2 race. You can hear the guy say “no, no way,” then there’s some yelling, and the audio goes out:

The Tesla just appears to be motoring along on the right side of the track like it’s any other road until it’s aggressively flagged down by marshals. Even in the grainy zoomed-in footage, you can see from body language that the Tesla driver’s getting quite a stern talking to (understandably).

A red flag is called, track workers guide the car back off the track with a UTV, and action eventually recommences.

The incident was discussed on Reddit’s r/motorcycles earlier this week, where people were commenting that the event organizers share some blame here for not comprehensively closing paved routes to the course.

Which, yeah, I guess. But I’m sure this Tesla drove by some strong indicators that it was not heading somewhere it wanted to be. And we, as a society, should be able to expect a modicum of common sense for civilians in cars. Like, come on, man.

It sounds like a red flag was called before the car actually appeared on camera, so the flag stand probably did spot it before it actually entered the track. The flag went up, racing was paused, and the situation was handled. Frankly, from the looks of it, the race organizers took care of business as best as one could when somebody randomly drives into your race.

“I feel pretty confident this is going to make the banquet highlight reel,” the commentator says. Indeed. And now these racers will probably have a hard time seeing a red Tesla without feeling a tiny pang of PTSD.

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