A McLaren that split in half and burned at an Irvine, California intersection early Sunday killed both people inside it, and family has identified one of them as James Wehr, a 27-year-old who helped build one of Southern California’s biggest car gatherings.
Irvine police say the call came in at about 12:18 a.m. on Sunday, September 13, from Culver Drive at Deerfield Avenue. Officers and Orange County Fire Authority crews arrived to find the 2019 supercar already engulfed. Once the fire was knocked down, crews found two bodies in the wreckage.
What investigators have pieced together so far is bleakly simple. The McLaren was sitting at the light, pointed north on Culver Drive. The signal turned green, the driver got hard into the throttle, and the car got away from them. It drifted right, clipped a curb and hit a tree with enough force to tear the chassis into two pieces before fire took what was left.
Irvine PD has not said who was behind the wheel, and it has not officially released either victim’s name. The department’s Major Accident Investigation Team has the case, and Detective David Juarez is asking anyone who saw the crash or the moments before it to call 949-724-7047.
Word got out the way it usually does now. Around 10 a.m. Sunday, the South OC Cars & Coffee Instagram account posted that Wehr was one of the two people killed, telling followers the group had lost “our darling son and brother James” in a motor accident just after midnight. His mother, Sarah Wehr, followed with her own post that evening, writing that she remembered his first steps at the family’s home in Perth, Australia, and that his “love for people, for your friends and your family, was second to none.” He would have turned 27 last month.
If you have spent any Saturday morning in south Orange County, you have probably stood in something Wehr helped create. South OC Cars & Coffee started small, in the parking lot of a Target in San Clemente, and outgrew it fast enough that Wehr and his father moved the whole thing to the Outlets at San Clemente. It runs 9 to 11 a.m., rain or shine, with no registration and no gate. On a good weekend the lot fills with 1,000 to 3,000 cars, everything from hypercars and vintage metal to rat rods, pickups and bikes. The group bills it as the largest weekly car show in the world, and on a Saturday morning it is hard to argue.
That is the part that stings for the people who show up every week. Cars and coffee culture exists because somebody is willing to do the unglamorous work of organizing it, week after week, for free. Wehr was one of those people.
The crash also lands in the middle of a conversation the enthusiast world keeps having and keeps not resolving. Modern supercars make numbers that used to belong to race cars, and they make them instantly, on a cold street, from a dead stop, in traffic. A 2019 McLaren will do things at a green light that a driver has no warning about until the back end is already gone. None of that is a verdict on who was driving or what happened in the two seconds after the light changed. It is just the reality that sits behind a lot of these reports.
Irvine’s investigation is ongoing, and the second victim’s identity is still pending notification.
What do you think it would take to make the gap between street driving and modern supercar performance less dangerous? Are the cars asking too much of drivers, or are drivers asking too much of the street?