You’ve always got to be paying attention at the track, even during the times where it seems nothing could possibly go wrong, like in the staging lanes. One racer got way too good a look at a Goodyear slick a couple years back at a race I was announcing.

If you regularly read this weekly installment to the BangShift.com blog, you may recall the story of a man driving his blown Altered into the woods rather than into the sand trap at the top end of the dragstrip. The guy crashed the car into a big tree. He’s involved in this incident, but on the day this went down, he was nothing but an innocent victim.

Pro Comp qualifying was called to the lanes and the cars slowly made their way around the top of staging to prepare for their qualifying runs. This class is made up mostly of blown dragsters and Altereds. The quality of those two types of cars varies wildly from top to bottom, but suffice it to say that one of the hardest chargers was a car that had enough snot to run in the high-5-second zone in the quarter mile.

As the competitors lined up, the little Altered was sitting behind a very serious dragster. The dragster was about 250 inches in wheelbase, had a blown, alcohol injected, all- aluminum Hemi, a Lenco trans, and all the bells and whistles that any modern serious alcohol car has.

As the dragster was fired up, crew guys were reaching into the cockpit to help the driver with something, which turned out to be the handle for the reverser. After a couple seconds of thrashing the crew guys stepped away and the driver of the dragster whacked the throttle, presumably to pull ahead and do his burnout.

Instead, what happened is that the dragster darted backwards and, in one of the more surreal things I have seen, the dragster climbed the nose of the Altered, up the motor, bounced off the bug catcher, and much to the dismay of the Altered driver, was making a beeline toward him.

He skootched back into his seat and the slick literally climbed the roll cage bars and made it all the way to the top, at which time the dragster, at an amazing angle, flopped over onto its side, with the blower still whirring away. Like a monster truck, the dragster climbed and tried to crush the Altered.

The dragster driver was freaking out, the driver of the Altered looked as though he had seen his life flash before him. Amazingly, the only thing the guy in the altered had to do was have another piece of the body made to replace the one that was broken by the dragster.

About a month later both guys were back out on the track racing (but not lined up behind one another).