Unheeded warnings: Wheelstand prevention
“Unheeded warnings I thought I thought of everything” is one of the lyrics from the Pink Floyd classic, Learning To Fly. In light of Kate Harker’s recent blowover in Sonoma, among other recent accidents, I feel it is essential we take a hard look at preventing these blowovers.
The Top Fuel/Top Alcohol blowover accident has the potential to be the most deadly of all drag racing accident types. No other type of accident presents the potential for the car to become oriented towards the starting line with the capacity to head in that direction at a high rate of speed. While these accidents do not happen often, it won’t take but once for the effects to be long-lasting and detrimental.
This blowover type of accident took the life of one of my close friends, Shelly Howard, and her son Brian. In what was one of the worst if not the worst accident in drag racing history, Howard was testing a new dragster at Tulsa Raceway Park in April 2005 when she experienced a blowover around half track. The car rotated while in the air and came to rest on all fours, in tact and facing the starting line. Upon impact she was either killed or incapacitated. The throttle also stuck wide open upon impact. The car slid approximately 400 ft past the finish line under full throttle. The car then started coming back towards the starting line under full power. After bouncing off each wall, the car slammed into the tow vehicle on the starting line at an estimated speed well in excess of 250 mph. Her son Brian was sleeping in the tow vehicle. Both were dead on the scene. The sheer magnitude of the accident has scarred the lives of those present. It has put a gaping hole in the racing community as Shelly was a friend of so many.
Freak accident certainly comes to mind when trying to describe such an accident. However, just a few months later, I witnessed an accident at the Texas Motorplex that proved that such an accident can happen again, and almost did. Gene Snow was making a Monday test lap after the October national event. He was ‘shaking down’ the car for his now-current driver Spencer Massey to start making license passes. I was servicing the car I was driving at the time for the next event and wanted to watch the pass, so I rode our pit bike to the fence near the top end grandstands. Jerry Darien crewmembers Grand
Stoms and Chris Perl were down the fence from me. I got to the fence just in time to see Snow launch with the wheels up. The front end kept climbing and eventually blew over.
While I wasn’t on hand to see Shelly’s accident, her crash immediately came to mind while Snow was flying through the air in front of me. At that point, the car started to rotate in air facing the starting line. It came down on all four’s, just as if the picture in my mind were happening all over again -- and to an extent, it was. The car started sliding down track, facing the starting line, smoking the tires under acceleration. I honestly can’t report much of what the car did because I was busy getting around the back of the stands on the pit bike. At some point, one of the rear tires broke off the car, potentially preventing another catastrophic circumstance where Gene could have powered towards the starting line with crew and other drivers present.
