A luxury sports car – estimated to be worth more than $1m – was washed out of its owner’s garage and submerged beneath feet of water as Hurricane Ian tore through a Florida neighbourhood.
The bright yellow McLaren P1, a luxury vehicle that can top out at 217mph and can go from 0 to 60mph in just 2.2 seconds, was captured in Instagram footage by its owner, Ernie.
Ernie shared images of the eye-catching vehicle, purchased by the Florida resident just one week ago, tucked beneath a tree outside his Naples home with water eddying around where the switchblade doors previously would’ve opened upwards to the sky.
“Car went thru the garage,” said the owner of the sports car in a caption on the post showing the damage from the Category 4 storm that pounded the southwestern coast on Wednesday before it was downgraded to a tropical storm as it made its way north to South Carolina on Thursday.
On a separate Instagram account, called Rich Kids of London, they shared video footage from Ernie’s street which surveyed the full damage of his neighbourhood while also providing a bird’s eye perspective of just how deeply submerged the man’s luxury car was.
“The hypercar is owned by @lambo9286 and was parked in the garage before flood waters pushed it outside,” the caption read. Gusts of wind can be seen pushing waves nearly over the roof of the car as the video is scored to a cover of the Linkin Park song “In the End”.
Ernie, who appears to use his Instagram account to catalogue his expansive – and expensive – collection of luxury cars, had posted just one week earlier about purchasing the P1.
“Only 300 miles on it,” he wrote in a caption of the car’s first picture shared to his grid, in a much sunnier shot of the driveway outside his Florida home. “Time too add to it!”
A day before Ian had sent 12ft storm surges to the coast and knocked power from more than two million residents in the Sunshine State, the luxury car owner had shared a picture of his McLaren with two small bags of groceries tucked inside, jokingly captioning it his “hurricane supply car”.
The storm, considered to be one of the most powerful systems recorded in the US, has so far claimed the lives of at least five people in Fort Myers.
Meanwhile, the Coast Guard has been steadily at work in search and rescue operations, airlifting stranded residents from their roofs since daylight broke on Thursday.
