Riding in an airborne race car at well over 150 mph has done little to deter Stevie "Fast" Jackson from returning to competition.
Jackson, a Pro Nitrous racer who doubles as a Drag Radial competitor, experienced a horrific crash on Oct. 9, 2016 in Valdosta, Ga, when his Fox-bodied Mustang pulled into a power wheelstand around 200 feet into the run, catching air underneath causing the car to fly. The projectile race car turned right and flew rear first into the retaining wall before crashing back to the ground. and rolling over on its roof before sliding to a stop in the shutdown area just past the eighth-mile finish line.
"I'm just a little beat up and sore, but I am alright," Jackson said.
Drag racers have perished from lesser crashes, and while Jackson understands he came out on the positive end of the mishap, the aftermath of the accident was the last thing on his mind as his car was careening down the track.
"All I was thinking about was winning," Jackson admitted. "So, which is normally what you’re thinking about when you pile one up. You know the front end came up, kind of extremely and abruptly, I blipped the throttle one time, and it started to come down.
"I put my foot in the throttle again. And as soon as I put my foot in it, I don’t know if it hit a gust of wind or whatever, but the car took flight. As soon as it took flight, I was along for the ride. When you have nothing touching the ground, you are not driving it."
When his focus shifted from winning to self-preservation, Jackson said he relied on dirt bike riding experience in an attempt to corral the errant race car back under control.
"I pumped the brakes and tried to get it to endo like a motorcycle, but it did not work," Jackson explained. "The parachute on the video looks like it took a long time. It seemed like it took 10 times that long in the car. I actually looked over at one point to try to see out the side window, just to see where I was going to wreck so I could kind of get a plan, it was that long in the air."
The one part of the track Jackson didn't want to hit was the scoreboards. There are at least two documented instances where drivers have hit these and gotten killed.
"I knew the scoreboards were over there somewhere and I did not want to hit them," Jackson recalled. "I don’t know what I figured I would have done, but I wanted to see where I was going."
On this particular weekend, Jackson was racing his Drag Radial car, a car so volatile many experts have deemed it's not a matter if a car like this will wreck, it's when it will wreck.
Jackson said for all of the destructive moves the car made in the accident; it's still repairable.
"I don’t know if we will repair it, but we haven’t got that far," Jackson said. "We kind of piled it in the trailer. The chassis held up very well. I don’t think anything’s actually bent in the structure. It has to have a body of course. But I don’t know that we’re going to. Too soon to know. First thing we’ve got to do is cut the body off, get the drivetrain out of it, and then start measuring stuff and seeing if it’s worth repairing, or scrap it and start over. I don’t know. I don’t have a good answer for that yet."
Jackson said from the moment he began driving one of these cars, he began preparing for the day one might crash.
"I don’t know about everybody else, but I’ve practiced and actually drilled fire, and getting out of the car under stress," Jackson said. "I know where my [safety] stuff is. I know how to get out, and I’ve thought about escape routes if you’re trapped in there, against the wall, on fire. I want to be prepared as much as I can.
"You can never prepare for getting out upside down because obviously you can’t flip the car upside down and try to get out of it. But, anytime you’re going to drive something that’s got 3,500 horsepower on street tires that weighs a lot, you’re going to have incidents like these periodically.
"This isn’t the first one of these, and it won't be the last one. Part of the draw for the fans of this deal is it’s hard, they’re hard to drive, and you’re going to see some stuff like this from time to time. Even though nobody wants to see it, it’s inevitable. Racing’s dangerous. A lot of times you’ll go a year or so and not have anything bad happen."
Jackson says he will race again, and in a Drag Radial car, even knowing what he just walked away from. He's willing to go as far as saying he plans to dominate when he returns.
"There’s a lot of parts of these cars that’ll kill you. Racing is a dangerous sport," Jackson said. "When something like this happens, everybody flips out a little bit. It’s amazing that it doesn’t happen more often. My car is 100-inch long factory wheelbase car, they’re prone to wheelie-ing, and we’ve had it stand up before. And I’m pretty good at driving it, pretty good at driving stuff on the on the back tires. But you know, sometimes that doesn’t work out when you have no tires on the ground."
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Bobby Bennett is the Publisher/Editor of CompetitionPlus.com, a leading independent online drag racing magazine, since 1999. For the latest in dragster news worldwide, visit www.competitionplus.com or follow on Twitter @competitionplus
