The McLaren had already burned once. Early on Sept. 13, it split in two against a tree in Irvine, California, and caught fire with two people inside: James Wehr, a 27-year-old Orange County car-show owner with more than 50,000 Instagram followers, and Alexis “Lexi” Kramer, a 22-year-old Florida model whose Instagram bio listed her as a 2026 Hooters calendar model. Firefighters put that fire out.
Thirty-one days later, the front half of the wreck started burning again. It was parked inside a secured tow facility in Costa Mesa, and nobody was near it.
That is the account the Irvine Police Department gave in an Oct. 17 update to its release on the fatal crash. The department said the collision, the separation of the car and the first fire caused “extensive damage to the McLaren’s structure and electrical system.” On Wednesday evening, Oct. 14, the front section of the wreckage “spontaneously ignited” at the Costa Mesa facility, which the department contracts to store collision vehicles.
Costa Mesa Fire and Rescue is investigating the fire. Police said preliminary findings, backed by surveillance video, indicate that no one was present or touching the vehicle when it ignited.
What the storage camera shows
The department posted an 84-second clip from the facility’s Camera 11. Police said the footage is sped up and that vehicles unrelated to the crash have been blurred out. The timestamp on the video starts at 11:36 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 14.
At first the storage area is still. Within the first minute of camera time, a small, bright point appears low on the left side of the frame, and over the next several minutes it grows. By about 11:41 p.m. there is open flame. By 11:43 p.m., fire is burning along the left wall and smoke is spreading across the room. By 11:47 p.m., the picture is a flat field of gray.
According to the timestamps, about 11 minutes pass between the first visible light and a camera that can no longer see anything.
The crash that put it there
According to the department’s original release, officers received calls at 12:18 a.m. on Sept. 13 about a crash with a vehicle on fire at Culver Drive and Deerfield Avenue. Investigators’ preliminary findings say a 2019 McLaren had been stopped northbound on Culver at the Deerfield light. When the light turned green, the car traveled north “at a high rate of speed.” The driver lost control, and the car went to the right, struck a curb and then a tree. It split in two and caught fire.
After Orange County Fire Authority crews put out the fire, two people were found dead inside. The Orange County Sheriff’s Department Coroner Division identified them as James Wesley Simon Wehr, 27, of Irvine, and Alexis Helena Kramer, 22, of Lakeland, Florida. Police said investigators have “clear evidence” that Wehr was in the driver’s seat and Kramer was in the passenger seat.
Wehr was a familiar name in Southern California car culture. He and his father, Simon, ran South OC Cars and Coffee, a Saturday-morning gathering at the Outlets at San Clemente. In a 2023 interview with Voice of OC, Wehr estimated that 800 to 1,000 cars showed up each week. His Instagram profile, which has about 53,000 followers, still lists him as the show’s owner. Kramer’s profile lists Tampa, her age and “hoots calendar ’26 model,” and much of her feed features motorcycles.
The department has identified the car only as a 2019 McLaren. It has not named the model.
How a wreck can catch fire a month later
Police have not named a cause, and the fire investigation is still open. The only explanation the department has offered is the condition of the car: a body torn in half and an electrical system that went through both a crash and a fire.
Fires in wrecked cars that start up again later are usually discussed as an electric-vehicle problem. In a 2021 safety report, the National Transportation Safety Board examined three high-speed crashes in which damaged EV batteries caught fire. All three batteries reignited after firefighters had put them out. The board tied that risk to “stranded” energy left in a damaged battery. Parked EVs can also spread fire to other vehicles, as a fire at a Fort Worth Cadillac dealership showed this month.
Irvine police’s statement does not mention a high-voltage battery. It points to the car’s structure and electrical system.
Ordinary vehicle wiring starts plenty of fires on its own. The U.S. Fire Administration analyzed fire department reports from 2014 to 2016 in its highway vehicle fire report. It found that an electrical failure or malfunction, such as a short circuit, contributed to 21% of highway vehicle fires. Electrical wire insulation was the item most often ignited first, at 29%. Those figures cover vehicles in general, not wrecks in storage. A crash violent enough to separate a car into two pieces, however, is the kind of force that can cut, crush or strip wiring.
What police haven’t said
The Oct. 17 update leaves several questions open:
- What, specifically, ignited
- Whether any other stored vehicles or the building were damaged
- Whether the second fire affected the examination of the car for the crash investigation
The department said both the collision and fire investigations are ongoing and that it has no more information to share.
The department’s Major Accident Investigation Team has said its review of the crash will take months. It will look at road and vehicle conditions, the car’s speed and any factors that may have affected how Wehr was driving the McLaren. Anyone with information about the crash is asked to call Detective David Juarez at 949-724-7047.
A wrecked car held for a crash investigation is usually the one piece of the case that stays put. This one sat in a secured facility for a month. Then, on a Wednesday night with no one in the room, it caught fire again.