An elderly man in Latvia recently got his 15 minutes of fame after a video of him driving an old Audi into a makeshift pool filled with 6,000 two liter bottles-worth of Coke to see if it would help get rid of the rust, went viral this week.

The eccentric 73-year-old Latvian, whose name has not yet been revealed, claims that he spent around $8,700 setting up the bizarre yet hilarious experiment. He started out by digging a large hole on his farm, near Sheder, south-east Latvia, lining it with thick plastic foil, and then proceeded to empty a whopping 6,000 two-liter bottles of Coke into it. For his first trick, he poured 88 pounds of baking soda into the fizzy pool, attempting to create a spectacular chemical reaction, but seeing that nothing too impressive happened, he got into his old Audi 80 and decided to drive it into the pool to see if the Coke would clean up all the rust.

There are a number of videos on YouTube showing Coke to be a very efficient rust remover, so there was some merit to the old man’s idea, but the execution was less than perfect. Unfortunately, he pushed the acceleration a little too hard and overshot the jump into his makeshift pond, crashing the front of car into the opposite side of the pit. It’s not clear whether the Coke did actually take care of the rust, but he did damage the car pretty badly and had to use a tractor to tow it out of the pool, so I guess that cancel any positive effect of the soda.

But seeing the man smile all throughout the ordeal, you can tell that it’s all about having fun, and not really testing the rust-removing properties of Coke. And as for the steep cost of the experiment, even though it cost roughly three times his annual pension ($2,250), he’s not too worry about, as his children and relatives who live abroad offered to pay for it. I guess his happiness is very important to them.