Big oops, as spotted by Car News China in Shanghai.

A Ferrari FF drove into the back on a truck on a bicycle lane. Furthermore; the Ferrari was driven by a laowai (foreigner) with a laowai-chick on the passenger’s seat.

It’s not as expensive an accident as a Lamborghini running into a Rolls Royce, but nonetheless… OOPS.

It also looks like there was a second Ferrari on the scene. “Was the black car trying to overtake the gray car, sneakingly using the bicycle lane?” Car News China asks. Moral here: stay out of the bike lane, cars.

Ferrari FF hits a truck in China, on a Bicycle Lane (Car News China)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a group of Ferraris road race on a Chinese highway; crash; disintegrate into a thousand pieces.

Around 3:30 pm today on the Shaanxi Baomao Highway in Ansai County, Shaanxi province, witnesses say they saw about a dozen Ferraris traveling at absurdly fast speeds. Two of them bumped into each other, and the result was what you see above (more pictures after the jump, all via NetEase). So far there have been no reports of fatalities, and if that remains the case, the Grim Reaper must have fallen asleep at his desk, or decided that even idiots deserve the occasional reprieve. Judging by the images, it looks like it had been raining at the time of the accident.

If, in fact, there were fatalities, our condolences go out to the families of the deceased: your loved one was being an idiot.

(H/T Bill Bishop)

In the predawn hours of March 18, a black Ferrari 458 Spider carrying three passengers crashed into a metal guardrail under Baofusi Bridge on Fourth Ring Road. The driver, a male in his 20s, died at the scene. Two other passengers somehow survived.

The driver was identified only by his surname — Jia. It’s a homonym for fake, and sure enough, as South China Morning Post now reports from behind a paywall, it indeed was. “Some have speculated that it was a deliberate choice to throw people off track,” SCMP writes — that is, off the track of the real driver and onto the track of Jia Qinglin, a high-ranking Politburo Standing Committee member who has an illegitimate son surnamed Jia.

According to SCMP, Jia conducted his own investigation and easily found the driver to be Ling Gu, son of Ling Jihua, who happens to be President Hu Jintao’s principal aide and a hopeful for one of the nine seats on the next Standing Committee.

High-level political intrigue is the best kind, isn’t it?

What have we learned from this revelation?

1. State media knows what it’s doing. Remember when James Fallows wrote about that “astounding article” in Global Times? He was talking about GT’s reportage that information about the Ferrari crash had been “hushed up.” It turns out the censors most likely wanted the hush-up to be publicized, because they knew — absolutely must have known — that such a hush-up would inevitably fan the flames of speculation toward Jia Qinglin. Ling Gu, the actual driver, was never even close to being implicated, which meant Ling Jihua was safe, which meant — more importantly — Hu Jintao was safe.

2. We know nothing. As Mark MacKinnon of the Globe and Mail noted in a March 20 article:

That might have been the end of the story – another tale of reckless driving on Beijing’s roads – if China’s tireless censors hadn’t kicked in and raised suspicions….

Soon, entering the word “Ferrari” on Chinese websites brought you to a dead end familiar to most of the country’s 500 million Internet users: “According to the relevant policies and laws, the search results are not shown.”

After years of living behind the “Great Firewall,” those 13 words are now read by millions of Chinese as code for “there’s more to this story than we want you to know about.”

It turns out that Chinese censors are now using censorship to fan the flames of speculation, not quell it. What a neat trick. We always say the rule-breakers are always a step ahead of the rule enforcers, but what if those enforcers were just as savvy, if not more so, than the people they pursue, and in fact were like cats, merely toying with their prey because the chase will always be more fun than the kill?

3. Where censors really needed to thrive, they did. Reports SCMP:

Beijing media sources said they had known for a long time that Ling Gu was killed in the accident, but blanket censorship was immediately imposed.

“It was a gag order at the highest level. I have never seen any car accident that deserves an order of this level,” a senior Beijing state media source told the Post.

The Global Times piece wasn’t an accident. High-level editors in the mainland are beholden to the Party, always remember that.

Some more details: apparently Jia Qinglin gave the result of his private investigation to Jiang Zemin, who reportedly sat on the report for nearly three months. And then…

On June 12, days after Ling Gu was identified by Boxun, Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing Wen Wei Po newspaper reported that Ling Jihua had been elected a party congress representative after capturing all the votes in his constituency, made up of agencies and organisations directly under the central government.

Observers see the timing of the Wen Wei Po report as a sign that Hu is backing Ling to sail through the political storm. A day earlier, Xinhua published a speech by Ling after his election.

Sources said that after the accident, Ling reportedly argued that he spent all his time serving Hu and had no time to look after his son properly.

But the damage has already been done. Ling was once tipped as a “dark horse” for elevation to the Politburo Standing Committee at this autumn’s party congress, which would have ensured Hu maintained his influence after his retirement.

But analysts said the best Ling could hope for now was to become one of the 24 full members of the Politburo. Saturday’s reshuffle seemed to suggest even this has become difficult.

So the final two lessons:

4. The public is a pawn in the great chess game of Chinese politics. Xinhua publishes a speech by Ling, and that act tells us more than anything the content of the speech — or Xinhua itself — ever could.

5. We know nothing. Let me get this straight: Hu Jintao didn’t know the real identity of the driver for nearly three months, yet someone felt the need to protect him by steering speculation toward Jia, who happens to be one of the most powerful men in the Communist Party? Something else is going on here.

All we can do, should we choose to, is speculate, as if that’ll get us anywhere.

There aren’t many Ferrari owners in China who will win sympathy votes from non-Ferrari drivers for this incident in Shanghai, video of which was posted two days ago. The negative publicity for the Italian luxury car began with Bo Guagua; unfair as it may be, “Ferrari” became associated with princelings and their wealth and corruption. A public relations stunt then went horribly wrong in Nanjing, whereby a “drifting” Ferrari left skid marks all over a 600-year-old Ming Dynasty wall. And then there was the crash in Singapore, where an alleged son of a Chinese official, speeding in a Ferrari and running a red light, killed himself and two others in a taxi. Backlash against the riche — nouveau or otherwise — has never been higher in China; now’s not the best of times to be caught flaunting an expensive ride.

Putting all that aside though… whatever you’re driving, don’t be a dick and lay into the horn on a pedestrian. Or horses. Especially horses. Because they — unlike humans — will not stifle their desire to kick the paint off your schmancy motormobile; a Ferrari, in their eyes, is but another quadrupedal jalopy jalopic quadruped, and if you piss it off, it will ruin your day.

According to this news report, the horse riders were parading around Shanghai World Expo park to raise environmental awareness. After encountering a bit of traffic, drivers, as they’re wont to do here, began honking. It’s unclear where the honks were coming from, exactly, but the horse in the video reacted as I’m sure you and I usually want to in that situation. Animal instincts, in this case, proved more entertaining than human inhibitions.

The Ferrari driver didn’t call the cops “likely because he didn’t have a license plate on his car, damage seem[ed] limited,” according to MIC Gadget.