A 25-year-old Richmond man was handed a $468 excessive speeding ticket and had his $70,000, 2015 Corvette towed to the impound lot for seven days after being clocked at about 150 km/h in West Vancouver.
The driver was speeding alongside another driver, in a 2018 McLaren, who received the same punishment.
As a result, West Vancouver police impounded more than $400,000 of vehicles early Wednesday morning.
Just after midnight, West Vancouver officers spotted the two leadfoots travelling west on “the Cut” on Highway 1 at Lonsdale Avenue - an 80 km/h zone - and pulled them over.
“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.
