Gumball Death
05 May 2007, 03:20 PM
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I know the golf is focked, but the porsche doesnt have damage consistant of "massive speed".
Too much jumping on the blame wagon going on. We need to wait and see.
IF they waited for ambulance, then got the **** out of there in the russian M6, and volunterily gave statements at the border then their actions seem fair enough. As for the time of the accident, the investigations will provide more info - until then anyone blaming Nick is just making up BS.
Too much jumping on the blame wagon going on. We need to wait and see.
IF they waited for ambulance, then got the **** out of there in the russian M6, and volunterily gave statements at the border then their actions seem fair enough. As for the time of the accident, the investigations will provide more info - until then anyone blaming Nick is just making up BS.
05 May 2007, 10:54 PM
#62
I know the golf is focked, but the porsche doesnt have damage consistant of "massive speed".
Too much jumping on the blame wagon going on. We need to wait and see.
IF they waited for ambulance, then got the **** out of there in the russian M6, and volunterily gave statements at the border then their actions seem fair enough. As for the time of the accident, the investigations will provide more info - until then anyone blaming Nick is just making up BS.
Too much jumping on the blame wagon going on. We need to wait and see.
IF they waited for ambulance, then got the **** out of there in the russian M6, and volunterily gave statements at the border then their actions seem fair enough. As for the time of the accident, the investigations will provide more info - until then anyone blaming Nick is just making up BS.
06 May 2007, 07:38 PM
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06 May 2007, 08:58 PM
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06 May 2007, 08:59 PM
#70
taken from the times:
May 6, 2007
Focus: It was meant to be a ‘good laugh’. But now with two dead no one is smiling
John Arlidge on how the Gumball rally went tragically wrong
The £120,000 Porsche 911 Carrera, with a top speed of over 170mph, was cruising a few miles from the border between Macedonia and Albania. Behind the wheel was Cheshire-based property developer Nick Morley, 29, and next to him his entrepreneur friend Matthew McConville, 32.
The pair, who had left Athens that morning, were competing in a rally known as the Gumball 3000 and were running late. They had invitations to a gala dinner that evening, hosted by the prime minister of Albania in the presidential palace in Tirana.
They never made it. Around 6pm the Porsche slammed into a red Volkswagen Golf and both cars spun off the road and into a ditch. The VW driver, Vladimir Cepuljoski, 67, died near the scene and his wife Margarita died later in hospital.
The two Britons walked away badly shaken but unhurt.
How Wednesday’s accident happened remains contested. Locals say the Porsche was speeding along the wrong side of the road and that the two Britons left the scene. Morley and McConville insist they were cruising at a legal 40mph and that the VW pulled out of a T-junction into their path. They deny leaving the scene.
Either way, police arrested both men, at the Albanian border, and charged Morley with “heavy violation of traffic safety” and “failure to provide help to an injured person”. McConville was released on bail, but yesterday Morley remained in custody.
As the police set about establishing the truth, one thing that everyone agrees on is that the Gumball 3000 was an accident waiting to happen. Every May, jet-setters, trustafarians, royals, Middle Eastern movers and sheikhers and eccentrics of every stripe fuel up with testosterone and God knows what else to race their Porsches, Lamborghinis and Ferraris 3,000 miles across continents.
The rally is the go-faster creation of 34-year-old British former model and wannabe playboy Maximillion Cooper and is now being variously referred to as the “Dumball” and “Scumball” on the internet.
Competitors, supposedly vetted by Cooper, pay nearly £30,000 for the privilege of driving all day and partying all night. After each day behind the wheel there’s a swanky dinner, including hot’n’cold running babes. The race has a reputation for rock’n’roll style excess. Every year there is mangled metal, arrests, fines and trashed hotel rooms. Yet every year the drivers come back for more. Living dangerously is – they say – “a good laugh”.
No one is laughing now. As relatives of the Cepuljoskis grieved, Cooper cancelled the rest of this year’s race. A victory parade in central London, followed by a party with US hip-hop star Xzibit, Jamiroquai frontman Jay Kay and model Caprice, that was due to take place last night, was hastily cancelled.
The main sponsor, Adidas, which backed the race to the tune of £1m, pulled out on Friday and has cancelled all future sponsorship.
It’s the end of road for this year and what many are now asking is: is the Gumball party, and indeed the wider “petrol-head” phenomenon it stands for, over for good? CRITICS say the deaths prove that the very idea of braying speed freaks careering across continents like outlaws is so outdated and dangerous that it should be consigned to the history books and the old movies that inspired it. The Gumball is a homage to films such as the 1976 Gumball Rally and the 1981 Cannonball Run, starring Burt Reynolds.
The detractors are not just the usual battalion of health and safety nannies who object to a race in which competitors stick speeding tickets to their wind-screens as badges of honour.
Car manufacturers, usually happy to lend cars to celebrities taking part in races of almost any kind, refuse to loan cars to Gumballers. Silvia Pini, of Italian superbrand Maserati, says: “It’s just too risky. There are too many unknowns.”
Style and social commentators say the “toffs’ jolly” is also out of step with the socially responsible spirit of the age. Crawford Hollingworth, executive chairman of consumer analysts Henley Centre Headlight-Vision, says: “We live in an age where some things, such as buying a fancy car, have become a little too obvious and easy to decode. For the rich, giving back and making a difference to society is the new cool.
“Look at Bono or Warren Buffett. We envy the person who takes a year’s unpaid sabbatical to travel the world more than the one who buys a new Porsche.”
Even professional petrol-heads argue the Gumball should be scrapped. Michael Harvey, editor of BBC Top Gear magazine, Britain’s biggest-selling auto title, says: “The Gumball is a bunch of overprivileged, beautiful young things showing off in front of anyone bored enough to watch – or tragically, it turns out, get in their way. It’s elitist and silly.”
The Gumball is not the first road race to hit controversy of course: the Mille Miglia, which takes place next week from Brescia to Rome and back, was stopped in 1957 after a crash that killed two drivers and 11 spectators. But in less than a decade the Gumball has become the most notorious.
It began in 1999 when the well-connected Cooper invited his celebrity friends, including actors Jason Priestley and Billy Zane, and singer Dannii Minogue, to take part in a six-day trans-European road trip, a modern-day grand tour fuelled on parties.
The first race was incident-free. In the second, in which 85 cars left London and went to Spain, France, Italy and Germany, there were two accidents, a £6,000 fine for overtaking a police car, and a £10,000 bar bill. It was the third Gumball to Russia that got really crazy, with crashes, car-jack-ings and arrests.
By the time of the 2005 race from London to Morocco and back, the racers’ motto had become “Death or Glory” and bets on who would win had reached £1m. One German racer, Kim Schmitz, promised to give two of the hottest female drivers £500,000 each if they beat him. If he won, he got a threesome. He won.
The rally’s supporters praise its no-limits ethos and camaraderie. Regular Richie Warren,a 41-year-old Briton who owns underground record label Fuel, spoke about it last year in a way that now seems eerily prophetic. “You live on the edge,” he told Vanity Fair. “Yeah, someone might get killed. Some silly ******* . . . could go over on the wrong side of the road and total a f****** wife and children in their little car. It could happen .. . I couldn’t give a flying f***.”
Cooper claims he makes every effort to ensure participants stick to speed limits. But critics say his pleas fall on deaf ears. The wilder the Gumball has got, the faster it has grown.
Cooper was on his way to achieving his goal of making the race a mass-market brand. He recently launched dozens of spin-offs: Gumball clothing, records, TV and film. The race generates £10m a year and the spin-offs a larger figure. Advertising and marketing giant WPP valued the brand at £150m.
The cancellation of this year’s race means Cooper will lose money. Will he lose his business altogether? Some would love to see the back of him and are already doing their best to run him off the road. GERMAN police effectively banned the rally this year. Drivers were pulled over as they entered the country from Holland and forced to drive slowly on the autobahn – the one place where they could have legally driven at 200mph – behind a police escort.
Turkey refused the race access altogether. The Gumballers were forced to divert to Athens.
Cooper says he is shocked by Wednesday’s accident and insists he is doing everything he can to help the Cepuljoskis. He and his wife, Danish beauty Julie Brangstrup, flew to Skopje yesterday to pay their respects to the family.
Cooper told The Sunday Times last night: “This is the first time anything like this has happened in nine years.” That’s strictly true, but somewhat misleading. In Morocco two years ago a Lamborghini rammed a small car and injured the woman driver.
Cooper insists he wants to continue with next year’s race, which is due to begin in London and take in Moscow and North and South Korea before ending in Sydney.
“We bring amazing entertainment and enjoyment to drivers and to the people in the cities to which we go,” he said. “Whatever it takes to make it 100% safe, we will do, including having police escorts.”
Police escorts for would-be outlaws living a rock star life? Surely the millionaires and mad hatters who “go Gumball” would rather take the bus.
May 6, 2007
Focus: It was meant to be a ‘good laugh’. But now with two dead no one is smiling
John Arlidge on how the Gumball rally went tragically wrong
The £120,000 Porsche 911 Carrera, with a top speed of over 170mph, was cruising a few miles from the border between Macedonia and Albania. Behind the wheel was Cheshire-based property developer Nick Morley, 29, and next to him his entrepreneur friend Matthew McConville, 32.
The pair, who had left Athens that morning, were competing in a rally known as the Gumball 3000 and were running late. They had invitations to a gala dinner that evening, hosted by the prime minister of Albania in the presidential palace in Tirana.
They never made it. Around 6pm the Porsche slammed into a red Volkswagen Golf and both cars spun off the road and into a ditch. The VW driver, Vladimir Cepuljoski, 67, died near the scene and his wife Margarita died later in hospital.
The two Britons walked away badly shaken but unhurt.
How Wednesday’s accident happened remains contested. Locals say the Porsche was speeding along the wrong side of the road and that the two Britons left the scene. Morley and McConville insist they were cruising at a legal 40mph and that the VW pulled out of a T-junction into their path. They deny leaving the scene.
Either way, police arrested both men, at the Albanian border, and charged Morley with “heavy violation of traffic safety” and “failure to provide help to an injured person”. McConville was released on bail, but yesterday Morley remained in custody.
As the police set about establishing the truth, one thing that everyone agrees on is that the Gumball 3000 was an accident waiting to happen. Every May, jet-setters, trustafarians, royals, Middle Eastern movers and sheikhers and eccentrics of every stripe fuel up with testosterone and God knows what else to race their Porsches, Lamborghinis and Ferraris 3,000 miles across continents.
The rally is the go-faster creation of 34-year-old British former model and wannabe playboy Maximillion Cooper and is now being variously referred to as the “Dumball” and “Scumball” on the internet.
Competitors, supposedly vetted by Cooper, pay nearly £30,000 for the privilege of driving all day and partying all night. After each day behind the wheel there’s a swanky dinner, including hot’n’cold running babes. The race has a reputation for rock’n’roll style excess. Every year there is mangled metal, arrests, fines and trashed hotel rooms. Yet every year the drivers come back for more. Living dangerously is – they say – “a good laugh”.
No one is laughing now. As relatives of the Cepuljoskis grieved, Cooper cancelled the rest of this year’s race. A victory parade in central London, followed by a party with US hip-hop star Xzibit, Jamiroquai frontman Jay Kay and model Caprice, that was due to take place last night, was hastily cancelled.
The main sponsor, Adidas, which backed the race to the tune of £1m, pulled out on Friday and has cancelled all future sponsorship.
It’s the end of road for this year and what many are now asking is: is the Gumball party, and indeed the wider “petrol-head” phenomenon it stands for, over for good? CRITICS say the deaths prove that the very idea of braying speed freaks careering across continents like outlaws is so outdated and dangerous that it should be consigned to the history books and the old movies that inspired it. The Gumball is a homage to films such as the 1976 Gumball Rally and the 1981 Cannonball Run, starring Burt Reynolds.
The detractors are not just the usual battalion of health and safety nannies who object to a race in which competitors stick speeding tickets to their wind-screens as badges of honour.
Car manufacturers, usually happy to lend cars to celebrities taking part in races of almost any kind, refuse to loan cars to Gumballers. Silvia Pini, of Italian superbrand Maserati, says: “It’s just too risky. There are too many unknowns.”
Style and social commentators say the “toffs’ jolly” is also out of step with the socially responsible spirit of the age. Crawford Hollingworth, executive chairman of consumer analysts Henley Centre Headlight-Vision, says: “We live in an age where some things, such as buying a fancy car, have become a little too obvious and easy to decode. For the rich, giving back and making a difference to society is the new cool.
“Look at Bono or Warren Buffett. We envy the person who takes a year’s unpaid sabbatical to travel the world more than the one who buys a new Porsche.”
Even professional petrol-heads argue the Gumball should be scrapped. Michael Harvey, editor of BBC Top Gear magazine, Britain’s biggest-selling auto title, says: “The Gumball is a bunch of overprivileged, beautiful young things showing off in front of anyone bored enough to watch – or tragically, it turns out, get in their way. It’s elitist and silly.”
The Gumball is not the first road race to hit controversy of course: the Mille Miglia, which takes place next week from Brescia to Rome and back, was stopped in 1957 after a crash that killed two drivers and 11 spectators. But in less than a decade the Gumball has become the most notorious.
It began in 1999 when the well-connected Cooper invited his celebrity friends, including actors Jason Priestley and Billy Zane, and singer Dannii Minogue, to take part in a six-day trans-European road trip, a modern-day grand tour fuelled on parties.
The first race was incident-free. In the second, in which 85 cars left London and went to Spain, France, Italy and Germany, there were two accidents, a £6,000 fine for overtaking a police car, and a £10,000 bar bill. It was the third Gumball to Russia that got really crazy, with crashes, car-jack-ings and arrests.
By the time of the 2005 race from London to Morocco and back, the racers’ motto had become “Death or Glory” and bets on who would win had reached £1m. One German racer, Kim Schmitz, promised to give two of the hottest female drivers £500,000 each if they beat him. If he won, he got a threesome. He won.
The rally’s supporters praise its no-limits ethos and camaraderie. Regular Richie Warren,a 41-year-old Briton who owns underground record label Fuel, spoke about it last year in a way that now seems eerily prophetic. “You live on the edge,” he told Vanity Fair. “Yeah, someone might get killed. Some silly ******* . . . could go over on the wrong side of the road and total a f****** wife and children in their little car. It could happen .. . I couldn’t give a flying f***.”
Cooper claims he makes every effort to ensure participants stick to speed limits. But critics say his pleas fall on deaf ears. The wilder the Gumball has got, the faster it has grown.
Cooper was on his way to achieving his goal of making the race a mass-market brand. He recently launched dozens of spin-offs: Gumball clothing, records, TV and film. The race generates £10m a year and the spin-offs a larger figure. Advertising and marketing giant WPP valued the brand at £150m.
The cancellation of this year’s race means Cooper will lose money. Will he lose his business altogether? Some would love to see the back of him and are already doing their best to run him off the road. GERMAN police effectively banned the rally this year. Drivers were pulled over as they entered the country from Holland and forced to drive slowly on the autobahn – the one place where they could have legally driven at 200mph – behind a police escort.
Turkey refused the race access altogether. The Gumballers were forced to divert to Athens.
Cooper says he is shocked by Wednesday’s accident and insists he is doing everything he can to help the Cepuljoskis. He and his wife, Danish beauty Julie Brangstrup, flew to Skopje yesterday to pay their respects to the family.
Cooper told The Sunday Times last night: “This is the first time anything like this has happened in nine years.” That’s strictly true, but somewhat misleading. In Morocco two years ago a Lamborghini rammed a small car and injured the woman driver.
Cooper insists he wants to continue with next year’s race, which is due to begin in London and take in Moscow and North and South Korea before ending in Sydney.
“We bring amazing entertainment and enjoyment to drivers and to the people in the cities to which we go,” he said. “Whatever it takes to make it 100% safe, we will do, including having police escorts.”
Police escorts for would-be outlaws living a rock star life? Surely the millionaires and mad hatters who “go Gumball” would rather take the bus.
06 May 2007, 09:00 PM
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07 May 2007, 05:25 PM
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Have to agree. The whole event stinks - idiot toffs in daddy's car. High time it was canned.
07 May 2007, 05:44 PM
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There's lots of reasons to stop the gumball - Mostly encouraging people to drive quickly over long distances then party until the small hours....and repeat for a week, was always going to end in tears eventually. Whatever the organisers claim now - videoing it all and selling DVDs of the wilder antics counts as "encourage" in my book.
I cant really understand the dismissal of it as "toffs" though. I'm pretty sure most people involved would be dimissed as horribly common new money by anybody of any real class.
I do worry that there will be a backlash against any gathering of motoring enthusiasts though. The PC brigade dont, after all, need much encouragement.
I cant really understand the dismissal of it as "toffs" though. I'm pretty sure most people involved would be dimissed as horribly common new money by anybody of any real class.
I do worry that there will be a backlash against any gathering of motoring enthusiasts though. The PC brigade dont, after all, need much encouragement.
08 May 2007, 12:33 PM
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08 May 2007, 12:41 PM
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Yes, which is why I said until emergency services arrive
Also the Police do not have to be informed *unless* someone is injured
I think if it was me personally I would stay until the police arrive, and not just emergency services
the chances are if a collsion requires the need of emergency services you wont really be going anywhere far anyway
Best to hang around and give statements etc there and then
Also the Police do not have to be informed *unless* someone is injured
I think if it was me personally I would stay until the police arrive, and not just emergency services
the chances are if a collsion requires the need of emergency services you wont really be going anywhere far anyway
Best to hang around and give statements etc there and then
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