It's not about consistency (mine was fairly consistently 180, which judging by my proximity to the server is about normal for me), it's that there is nearly .2 seconds for me to receive any position packets from other drivers, along with that same time for them to receive any from me. Which as we saw.. causes issues.
Heck, I had that same situation happen in one of the practice sessions and all that happened was a spin. I bet even if we tried we would struggle to cause the same carnage. It was just 2 position packets that got received at the wrong time with spectacular results.
Proof that I travelled THROUGH the wall
Like I said, had you and I been on a USA server, that same incident likely wouldn't have happened as our pings would have been about 50ms or so (ping to my server in Cali is 48ms).
It does happen, and it sucks to have our races ended like that but with online racing, it's inevitable.