West Vancouver police impounded more than $400,000 of vehicles overnight Tuesday and that was just in one traffic stop.
Just after midnight Wednesday, West Vancouver officers spotted two leadfoots travelling west on the Cut. Police clocked the drivers of a 2015 Corvette and a 2018 McLaren 702s, both going about 150 kilometres per hour on Highway 1 at Lonsdale Avenue - an 80 km/h zone - and pulled them over.
The drivers, a 21-year-old Burnaby man, and a 25-year-old Richmond man, were each handed $468 excessive speeding tickets and had their cars towed to the impound lot for seven days.
A 2015 ‘Vette goes for about $70,000. The McLaren has a base price of over $312,000.
“I would imagine the tow truck driver is wanting to be extremely careful when they’re loading something like that up,” said Const. Jeff Palmer, West Vancouver police spokesman.
The two men were travelling together although there was no indication they racing, Palmer said.
So far this year, West Vancouver officers have impounded 90 drivers’ vehicles for excessive speeding – more than double the 42 they’d seized by this point last year.
Of those, 54 were caught on Highway 1. Cypress Bowl Road is the next most likely spot to get pinched speeding where police have called tow trucks 27 times to impound vehicles this year.
Palmer said Upper Levels Highway may be something of a destination to re-enact the Cannonball Run. An analysis of the tickets issued by police found only five to 10 per cent of them are handed out to West Vancouver residents.
“I think there certainly is some public perception this is all a bunch of wealthy young people from West Van taking supercars out for a drive, but when we actually looked into the files, there was just a very small percentage of them that were actually local residents. The vast majority were from elsewhere in the Lower Mainland,” he said.
Of the 90 drivers whose whips have been sent to car-jail, 72 are men aged 19 to 55, according to police.
