Video shows cars fall into St. Lawrence River during ice racing event near Montreal

A dramatic video posted on social media shows two cars falling through the ice on the St. Lawrence River at a racing event south of Montreal.

Footage of the accident from the weekend has been shared widely online since Saturday. The incident happened during the Kahnawake Ice Racing Series in  the Mohawk community of Kahnawake.

Footage from a dash camera inside one of the cars that went under the ice shows how the event unfolded.  

Partway through the competition, two cars are seen driving behind two other cars when they started to sink through the cracked ice.

The drivers of the vehicle that captured the footage quickly got out of the sinking car. The driver, Patrick Renaud, was captured on video walking on top of the hood of the car to get to safety. Vincent Noel was the second driver who plunged into the river.

Drone video also captured the frightening scene from the sky. 

Bryar Lawrence, the president of the ice racing event, wrote on Facebook that everyone made it safely out of their cars.

"No one was hurt," he wrote in the online post.

The racers gather around a submerged race car on the St. Lawrence River.

"We all know the risk we take as soon as we get on that ice and everyone understands this sport we love, comes with these types of risk."

Lawrence said teams returned the next day to retrieve the sunken cars.

Two cars plunged into the St. Lawrence River during the Kahnawake Ice Race.

A driver in the competition tells CTV News he’s participated in the event for 35 years and has never seen anything like this.

“It was just a freak accident,” said Derek White. “To have two cars fully submerged under water, it was just crazy.”

White says he watched from a distance as his friends scrambled to get out of their cars.

“They were kind of in shock, they were freaking out,” he said.

The thickness of the ice wasn’t a factor in the accident, according to White.

“We checked the ice the night before, in one corner it was 16 inches, in the other three corners it was 14 inches,” he said. “We won’t go on the ice unless it’s 10 inches thick.”

White says the cars used in the event are heavy—about 5,000 pounds each—and their close proximity on the ice may have contributed to the accident.