One of the things that keep me drawn to drag racing is that you literally never know what is going to happen on the next run. You can go an entire weekend, loading hundreds and hundreds of pairs down the track without incident and then all of a sudden this happens. Competition Eliminator racer Dale Giroux was the guy behind the wheels of the Camaro you see flipping below. As you will see, Giroux’s car was a bit unsettled from the hit of the throttle and it ended up working itself to the left of the groove before washing out from under him and leaving the guy as a helpless passenger, careening into the wall nose first with the car skidding along the driver’s door.
The tubular chassis which was designed for both performance and driver safety did its job to a T during the initial impact and continued to protect Giroux when the car went into a series of torturous rolls at the end of the calamity. The rolls look even more hurtful than the initial impact was. At least with the impact it was a glancing blow to some degree but when the thing slowly tumbled over a couple of times it was definitely bone jarring.
We hate to see stuff like this happen to racers who invest their blood, sweat, and hard earned money into their cars but in the end we are happy that Giroux essentially walked away and will live to race another time if he so chooses to fix the Camaro.
If any constellation, I rather see a crash like that than barrel rolling down the track.
A ProMod style car crashing could have been real ugly and I have seen a few!