Like all of us, even a professional race car driver at the top of their game can have an off day. The difference is, when a driver has a bad day, it’s usually in front of a huge audience and the damage tally can easily top hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Oh, and there’s the whole “bodily harm” aspect of crashing a high-speed racing machine into a wall at near-triple-digit speeds.

Last week during the final practice round for Formula Drift Texas, Vaughn Gittin Jr. suffered a nasty accident that put his car out of commission and him in the medic’s tent. Thankfully his injuries were all relatively minor, though his drift-ready Mustang is an entirely different story.

The official word from Gittin and his team is that the engine suffered a fueling error, resulting in rising and falling fuel pressure that eventually led to engine failure, just as Gittin was heading straight towards a concrete barrier.

“As soon as I knew the inevitable was coming, I remember thinking that going into the wall at that speed front-end was a very bad idea,” Gittin Jr. said this week. “I yanked the wheel, grabbed the handbrake, and used the momentum I had to spin the car around and back it in.”

The accident was hard enough to force the concrete barriers off its mooring. Thankfully, Gittin came out of the crash a little sore, but according to a MRI, he was otherwise in OK shape, allowing him to race in this weekend’s Trans Am event. Unfortunately for Gittin’s Mustang, it’s a total loss, leaving the 2010 Formula Drift champion without a ride going into 2015’s final contest, and the team remains unsure of what to do next.

It’s a crappy way to end a season undoubtedly…but there’s always next year, and with it comes an all-new drift-ready S550 Mustang to replace the totaled S197 he’s been using all year. You gotta look for the silver lining in a situation like this.