WORST of the Worst: Top 1000 Motorsport Crashes

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- A crash that brought out the safety car in the final race of the 1997 Formula 3 racing season in Fuji, Japan, where a young driver moving up fast from the back, Takashi Yokoyama, had failed to slow down in time, hitting a car in front of him and launching his own racing machine into the air before it tore through a signboard killing him instantly.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Running second with a few laps left on June 12, 2013, Jason Leffler was involved in a crash during a sprint car heat race at Bridgeport Speedway in  Logan Township, NJ.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Carlos Pardo, 33, a driver in NASCAR's Corona Series in Mexico, died Sunday, June 14, 2009, after crashing while leading on the final laps during a race held at the Autodromo Miguel E. Abed Amozoc in the Mexican state of Pueblo.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- During the 2011 running of the 24 hours of Le Mans, driver Allan McNish destroyed the No. 3 Audi in a spectacular crash early on, careening into a retaining wall, and though some debris from the shattered car went over, it didn't cause any injuries to nearby spectators.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Right from the onset, the 1960 Daytona Modified Sportsman race at Daytona International Speedway was a disaster with the biggest collection of cars caught up in a single crash at a NASCAR-sanctioned racing event -- 37 of them. Fortunately, though, there were no casualties.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Phil Krueger has had several bad wrecks and as horrible as this one looked, he escaped without major injury when he lost control of his car and struck the outside retaining wall with the rear-end, which cost him a chance to race in the 1981 Indy 500.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- The July 30, 2000, running of the Formula One German Grand Prix motor race at the Hockenheimring near Hockenheim, Germany, was won by Brazilian driver Rubens Barrichello driving a Scuderia Ferrari F1-2000 in his debut.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- The racing is billed on the Nürburgring VLN racing website as "MOTORSPORT CLOSE!" And that's an understatement as shown in an a raw video of a two-car crash coming of a turn on the road course in Wehrseifan, Germany. It's part of a 10-race endurance series of the Nurburgring VLN race, in this case the second of the 2012 racing season.