Von Smith okay after wild ride in Bahrain

The ’57 Chevy won’t be seen for a while.  (DRO file photo by Greg Bunsold)

Von Smith, driver of the Al-Anabi Racing Pro Mod Extreme 1957 Chevy, took an unplanned, upside-down ride in the first round of eliminations in Bahrain. He emerged from the incident virtually unscathed, but the Chevy that won the previous week’s race at the Qatar Racing Club in Doha, Qatar – with team owner Sheik Khalid Al Thani watching – was badly battered. Unknown to Smith, in prepping the track traction compound was not sprayed outside the groove and the lack of traction precipitated Smith’s wild ride.

“When I got into second gear, the car got outside the groove and moved toward the centerline,” Smith recalled. “Once I was out of the groove, the tire that was in the groove kept pushing me out and I kept steering it to the center. I’ve been in that position a thousand times. I didn’t think I was going to crash, but the last time I got back in the groove I was doing well over 200 (mph) and it just folded the slick over and grabbed the wheel and flipped the car over.

“The car went through the finish-line lights at 230 (mph) on its lid.  It skidded almost 600-700 feet. It went a long way on its roof.  After hitting the wall in the front, it kicked around and hit the back of the car … it just messed up it up really good.
  
“(Tim) McAmis builds a good race car. We knew that going in,” Smith added. “I said a little prayer when I was upside down. We have an inboard camera and I said, ‘this is going to hurt’ before it hit the wall and after it stopped sliding all that way I said, ‘well, I guess that’s it.’ And then I let the belts loose, fell on my head and climbed out the door.”

The early exit knocked Smith into a three-way tie for the Bahrain series lead. Because it may be months before the ’57 is fixed, the team wlll ship the ’68 Camaro overseas to run the remainder of the races.

Crew chief Howard Moon and the team from Atomic Performance plan to test the Camaro before sending it to New York to be shipped to Qatar.

“We already planned to test the Camaro because we were going to get ready for the ADRL race (April 10-11, at South Georgia Motorsports Park, Cecil, Ga.), but that’s all changed now,” Smith noted.

The Camaro was built to run eighth-mile races, not the quarter-mile races like those in Qatar and Bahrain.

“The problem with the Camaro is it has never been tested in a quarter-mile,” Smith said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen when it runs a quarter mile. It was made for eighth-mile racing. It’s made for going 200 miles an hour, not 250-plus miles an hour.  So we are kind of apprehensive. We’re going to run it to the eighth mile and then to 1,000 feet before we ever go to a quarter mile, just to make sure everything is good.” [4/1/2009]