Top Fuel Slow Accident
This Nitro fueled Big Block manages to destroy itself in the 60 foot 😕
So this Top Fuel Slow Accident makes you assume quite a few things when you watch it go down. Firstly it is a Nostalgia Front Engine Dragster on Nitro as you can tell by the cackle.
Again this looks like this is not a pro team by the attire of the crew on the starting line. Seeing it is a front engine dragster at a Nostalgia show it would figure to be a hobbyist deal. Anyway they start the car on the line and the car makes it’s initial burnout.
Pretty much standard affair for the very first part of the run. Next it is put into reverse and obviously something go’s completely wrong at that point. Yes the driver either seems to have turned the wheel way to much or something broke right 😕
So it spins the tires in revers and then all of a sudden slams it into forward :O It then hit the retaining wall hard enough to break the frame! Upon doing this at such a slow amount of speed you would have to wonder what is going on? The throttle then seems to get stuck on?
Now you have a Front Engine Dragster on Nitro Methane with the throttle stuck open trying to push the retaining wall over or something? Well you think maybe the driver is knocked out by now cause he has not tried to shut off the ignition? OK fair enough the driver is unconscious but, then you see either the crew or track official get caught on video that he is going to regret for a long time to come.
The engine is revving away smoking the tires so nobody can get close enough to see if the driver is OK or to let them reach in to hit the kill switch. Then they have to try to shut the engine down by smothering it but, Nitro Methane has it’s own Oxygen making it very hard to snuff out 🙁
They eventually shut the engine down and it turns out the driver passed out from Heat Exhaustion during the burnout. However it still doesn’t make full sense as he was awake enough to shift into reverse and then back into forward again before he hit the wall! So he must have been coming in and out of consciousness witch everything that happened. It was later learned he broke some ribs but, was treated at the hospital and is OK now.
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Author: trc
Located in Central NJ I wind up at lots of Car Events. Be it at Englishtown, Island or Atco Dragstrips or Somerville Main Street on Friday nights. If it involves High Performance cars I am most likely at the event!
Shutting down a nitro engine isn’t as simple as hitting a kill switch. They are shut off with the fuel valve, otherwise they will continue to run. dragsters like this usually use a reverser in place of a full transmission to back up. It would be easy for an unconscious driver, or even just the bouncing a vibration of a dragster backing up, to knock it out of reverse. It might be that if the driver doesn’t hold it in reverse, it pops out by itself.
Yes on Nitro but this is not a supercharged engine, it’s just a fuel injected nostalgia dragster that did a burnout. It was said he passed out so everything had to go perfectly to some extent for him to go from reverse back to forward and hit the throttle just enough to do that without going full throttle and grenading the engine. I have played with Nitro and could shut down the engine with the ignition as I was using a NA engine.