The NHRA medical crew tended to Dale Emery, who suffered a broken bone in his arm but was back at the track the next day, sharing his tale with Dale Armstrong. (The squeamish out there may well want to skip this part.) I knew that I’d hurt my arm but didn’t know then why.” “Looking down at the track, I was thinking, ‘This is going to be bad.’ After it hit, it rolled down the guardrail a couple of times, and they had to cut the cage off to get me out. I whipped it back and thought I’d saved it, but then the rear wheel hit the guardrail and just threw it right straight up in the air. “I kept turning the wheel, and when I finally lifted, the wheels were still turned, and it shot over to the other side. “When it left, it was carrying the front wheels, and it kept going over towards the center,” he remembered vividly. Running alongside Raymond Beadle’s Blue Max and attempting to better his opening pass of 6.22, 234.98, things quickly went bad for Emery. In retrospect, it’s surprising that his only injury was a small broken bone in his left arm. I was finally able to track down Emery last week to get the story of that crash as well as his memories of an action-packed and highlight-filled career in fuel racing.Īs you can see in the Larry VanSickle photo above and in the somewhat grainy video at right, Emery’s ride was a white-knuckler as it hit the guardrail, stood on its nose, then barrel-rolled down the guardrail’s knife edge. He had come to national attention and fan-favorite status in six years behind the wheel of Rich Guasco’s spectacularly unpredictable but wildly fast Pure Hell fuel altered and won a pair of NHRA national events in the mid-1970s and been on his head a few other times, including in an ill-fated stint as a wheelstander driver. Long before he saddled up behind the wheel of “Big Mike” Burkhart’s silver Camaro that fateful Friday in Indy, Dale Emery was no stranger to wild rides. This is that story and, behind that, the story behind the guy who rode out that terrifying tip-over at the 1977 U.S. We’ve seen them bank off of guardrails, fly through the air, and even wind up pointed the wrong way up the track.īut only once have we seen a Funny Car doing a nose stand at three-quarter-track. When they’re not pointed toward the finish line, they can be found zigzagging around their lane (and sometimes the other). Race fans are accustomed to seeing Funny Cars pointed every which way on the dragstrip.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |