This was the worst racing accident I have ever seen, bar none, end of story. No one said it in the press room where I was sitting but everyone thought Bruce Allen was dead. The tricky, all-concrete track at the Texas Motorplex, with its extremely hard-biting groove and ice-like outer edges had just sent Bruce Allen and Kenny Koretsky to the hospital, and many of us believed worse than that.

It was a hot Saturday night in Ennis, Texas, and the final qualifying session for Pro Stock was underway. I had called to chat with my dad to give him an early update on where guys were qualified before he’d see it on television when I noticed Bruce Allen was back a couple of pairs.

For whatever reason, when I was a kid watching this stuff on American Sports Cavalcade, I became a Bruce Allen fan. I was too young to know about Reher-Morrison or anything like that, I think I just liked the guy for some reason.

Anyway, I had talked with Bruce earlier that day in the pits to get some quotes about how his season was going as I was working the event as a reporter for an internet drag racing magazine. In the course of my conversation with dad I let him know I had talked to Bruce and told him about watching him in the old days. It was one of those quick, pleasant conversations you have and then move on.

As the two completed their burnouts and readied themselves to run down the track, I was writing my notes on the Sportsman coverage I was doing for the day. Normally, I wouldn’t stop writing so I could have my work done by the end of the night, but because it was Bruce, I did.

As you will see in the video below, a short distance past half track, Allen’s car drifted ever so slightly out of the groove onto that very slippery edge of a concrete track. The car spun the tires and got crossed up, catching air underneath itself and turning on its side. As all this was happening, Kenny Koretsky was on a lap in the other lane and pulling gears down the track. Allen’s car crossed the strip on its side directly in front of Koretsky, who literally drove through Allen’s car like it was a plate-glass window in a cheesy chase scene.

You hear people call crashes “horrifying” a lot, but this one actually was. The instant it happened, my brain was having trouble just believing what it saw. Then on the small wall mounted televisions in the press room we saw the replay and it seemed impossible that at least one of the men was not dead or at minimum critically injured. I called dad and told him that I thought I had just seen Bruce Allen get killed. It was a truly sickening few minutes. Believe it or not both men suffered relatively minor injuries (in the scope of what could have happened).

The video tells the whole story. Personally, I think this is the worst non-fatal wreck in the history of the NHRA.