A bridegroom who wept with joy when his fiancée hired him an exclusive supercar was left crying tears of a different kind, after he wrote it off while driving to the ceremony.
David Gallucci waited until after the wedding to tell new wife Abi Pattison-Hart - who had shelled out £8,000 for the experience - about his pre-nuptial prang in the Lamborghini Murciélago LP640 Roadster.
The car, which is reportedly worth up to a quarter of a million pounds when new, apparently hit a grass verge and took to the air after Gallucci lost control on a roundabout with his best man in the passenger seat.
After smashing through a fence and flipping 360 degrees, the yellow 200mph-plus supercar was left with an estimated £160,000-worth of damage to bodywork and suspension.
And company director Gallucci, from Baildon near Bradford, barely even had time to enjoy himself.
He told the Yorkshire Post how he was "in tears down the phone" to his fiancée when he first saw the car roll up his driveway, and how neighbours had crowded round to check it out.
Unfortunately, this was as good as it got, according to best man Warwick French.
"We'd barely got the seats warm before we were climbing out of the window," he lamented.
Gallucci phoned Pattison-Hart after the smash to say that he had experienced a simple break-down, but hid the real truth until after they had exchanged vows - a good idea given that £5,000 of the treat's cost was a deposit to cover the insurance excess.
Had she not paid this, his wife revealed, "we'd have had to sell the house".
Gallucci's encounter with the car - however brief - is unlikely to be fading from his memory anytime soon.
Indeed, as Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson prophetically wrote of it in The Times, "you are never likely to forget even the shortest drive".
