Yikes! What a shame to see that beautiful Mustang destroyed like that. Accidents like that are rare, but they can certainly happen, which is why we need to have proper agreed-value insurance on our collector cars.
Similar story, although far less disastrous: Years ago we had a regular participant at our club's big annual indoor show who owned a stunning '57 Ford Fairlane retractable hardtop, which he transported in a very nice enclosed trailer. Less than 5 miles from the show site, an incident happened on the freeway and his whole rig jack-knifed and overturned onto its side. They were able to use a crane to carefully right the truck and trailer and they made it to the show hall in time to enter and set up. The '57 suffered significant damage. He was allowed to show it anyway, with the judges agreeing to ignore the obvious accident damage. He still won his class, and rightly so.
Segue from that into my own lucky story: About 25 years ago, our club road-tripped out to east Texas to another club's big annual outdoor show. We had something like 30 cars in our caravan. As I pulled into a parking space at our club's chosen hotel, the high pressure power steering hose in my '72 convertible blew out, spraying PS fluid all over the hot exhaust. It burst into flames instantly, shooting a huge fireball out from under the car. We were able to quickly put out the fire, but there was a lot of cosmetic damage in the engine bay. I was able to replace the blown hose the next morning and made it to the show location just before the registration deadline. I explained to the head judge what had happened, and when my fellow club members backed me up, he agreed that they would not hold the fire damage against me. I won my class, and was runner-up for Best Engine.
