When Lightning McQueen travels through town while getting chased by the Sheriff, the barbed wire wrapped around him gets wrapped around the Stanley statue. McQueen pulls hard to get off it, and then the statue flies up into the air...and then lands directly in front of McQueen, scaring him and causing him to pull the statue down the road, tearing the latter up in the process, setting up one of the main focuses of the movie. What makes this scary is that not only does the statue have a somewhat creepy design, but when the statue lands, it briefly goes into a first person shot with a sudden Scare Chord, making it a somewhat effective Jump Scare.
Frank (pictured to the right). He’s basically the equivalent of an angry farmer trying to chase out kids who go cow tipping (tractor tipping in this universe), except he’s huge, has a gigantic blade roller, and a blood curdling scream.
More accurately, he's like an angry bull guarding a herd of cattle. And therefore he wouldn't have a problem outright killing trespassers...
A deleted scene in the first movie shows Lightning McQueen wandering through a car graveyard full of rusty and destroyed cars while trying to find Mack, with most of the car corpses either having plants growing through them or are impaled on some of the tree branches.
Another deleted scene had Lightning choose standard community service over doing a race in the first Radiator Springs Grand Prix, only to have a dream that Doc put his engine (and consciousness) in a steamroller while Mater's engine is put inside Lightning's body, with Mater running off to live Lightning's life once Mack shows up in the dream and Lightning is forced to pave the road. When he wakes up from the nightmare, he notices a steamroller corpse on the side and, rather understandably, changes his mind and ends the scene by deciding to do the race instead.
One of Lightning McQueen’s dream sequences shows Frank appearing at the final race. While King and McQueen are able to escape (but lose the race) Chick Hicks dies by getting grinded to bits. On one hand, he’s a dirty player and the main villain, and it’s just a dream, and it’s played for laughs. On the other hand it’s completely out of place for the movie and it’s glanced over like it’s nothing.
Chick Hicks causing a huge crash during the race at the start of the movie. The audience's reaction and the competitors' scream speak for themselves. One of them is even forced to leave the race (if not, his career) entirely because he's too damaged and mutilated beyond recognition to go on, almost like a guy with broken bones and/or blood loss. He could have easily murdered 40 competitors, McQueen included.
Speaking of death, crashes like these were often what caused the death of many of NASCAR's most famous racers and they're always treated as a tragedy, especially among their loved ones. If a Cars fan claims that Chick Hicks did not cross the Moral Event Horizon by nearly killing the King, they'll almost certainly claim that him causing the crash is where he crossed it while referencing said fatal crashes.
Chick violently bumping The King in the tie-break, causing him to crash. Seeing him looking so badly damaged, injured, unable to finish his last race and everyone's horror was bad enough, but then Lightning remembers what happened to Doc could happen to him too. At least he sacrifices his chance to win the Piston Cup to help him cross the finish line.
Darrel Cartrip said there were over 200.000 cars in the audience in Los Angeles. All of these people had just witnessed The King's horrific crash. And as he was badly damaged afterwards, it's like Chick tried to kill him out of pettiness, just like he nearly killed all of this poor racers the previous race, all of this for an empty cup. Just how low is Chick Hicks willing to sink into to get what he wants? He deserved all the flak he got from the audience for being disrespectful and cheating.
It doesn't help that the crash was based on an actual crash that happened to Richard Petty in 1988. It's bad enough that the cars in this film are alive, but it's scary to think about how a real person went through that...
