Swiss police are investigating an accident in which a drunk young Russian driver racing in a Lamborghini luxury sports car allegedly crashed into a Volkswagen, badly injuring an elderly German, and then fled the scene.

The Russian had been participating in a high-speed race outside the city of Geneva with three other expensive sports cars, all driven by fellow countrymen aged 20 to 25, local media reported. Police, however, said Monday that there was no evidence about a race yet.

Also, the names of the alleged drivers have not been released. Police said the four were questioned and released.

“The ongoing investigation is seeking to clarify the roles of all the drivers involved, and it’s difficult at this stage to say how long it will take,” Geneva police spokesman Patrick Pulh was quoted as saying by the GenevaLunch.com web site Monday.

Citing eyewitnesses, the reports said that before the crash late Thursday on a road along Lake Geneva, northeast of the city, the Lamborghini Murcielago had been racing to catch up with three other cars, a Bugatti Veyron, a Mercedes SLR McLaren and a Porsche Cayenne Turbo, which had earlier been seen parked outside a Geneva hotel.

The accident happened when the Lamborghini driver lost control of his car and hit the Volkswagen in front of him, sending it spinning into a guardrail. The VW’s 70-year-old driver had to be cut out from his car and is in serious condition in a hospital, local media said.

A breath analysis found that the Lamborghini driver had a blood alcohol level of 0.11 percent, more than double the Swiss legal limit of 0.05 percent, and more than triple the Russian limit of 0.03 percent, the Tribune de Geneve newspaper reported. The report said the driver left the scene of the accident before police arrived but was later found and questioned.

The driver, born in 1987, was a resident of Geneva and carried a Russian license, which is not recognized by Swiss authorities, the report said. All of the luxury vehicles were rented and police did not release any further details about their drivers except that they were all Russian and young, the reports said.

In a surprising move, Moscow’s representative to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, said Monday that the incident would have serious effects on the country’s image abroad.

“This accident will have big consequences … for Russians on the whole,” Rogozin told the Vesti-24 news channel. He added that the country’s “glamorous bumpkins” had gone from rousing just sneers to blatant provocation.

“It’s not just the car crash; it’s the way our citizens act in general when they’re abroad,” he said. “Sure, some of them might be as wealthy as Arab sheikhs, but believe me, Arab sheikhs don’t behave like we do abroad.”

The accident came just days after Moscow hosted a ministerial-level United Nations conference on road safety, attended by President Dmitry Medvedev and top police and transportation officials.

It is not the first high-profile crash involving wealthy Russian drivers abroad. In November 2006, the secretive Dagestan-born billionaire and Federation Council Senator Suleiman Kerimov was seriously hurt when he ran into a tree with a Ferrari in Nice.

Media reports at the time said he was in the car with television host Tina Kandelaki.