There are nightmare scenarios in racing that event the best, most talented, and experienced racers cannot extract themselves from. This video shows one of those horrifying situations when driver Mike Wacaser has the throttle hang open on his Pontiac Firebird drag car. Crashing into the wall on the left side of the track, Mike’s car comes across the drag strip, clearly burning transmission fluid and absolutely pile drives the wall. That second impact causes the still screaming car to erupt into a massive fireball which sustains itself as it rolls into the shutdown area. This is not a “flash fire” this is an old school blaze that consumes the entire automobile as Wacaser does his damnedest to get it stopped. You see him leap out of the car and run to the relative safety of the retaining wall clearly feeling the effects of the heat.
According to Urban Hillbilly’s Sean Melton, Mike suffered burns in this incident but he fully recovered and currently runs a nasty Chevy II. In true drag racer ball-busting tradition, his buddies nicknamed him “Shake and bake” after this incident. You’ll see the car being loaded onto a wrecker at the end of the video and the chassis seems to have held up pretty well considering all of the impact that it took. The billowing white smoke pouring from the car sure seems like ATF on the exhaust to us and when the second impact happened, enough got sloshed around to finally ignite, kicking off the burner.
This is an old school funny car fire…in a doorslammer.
PRESS PLAY BELOW TO SEE MIKE WACASER ESCAPE FROM THIS INFERO OF A RACE CAR WITH HIS LIFE –
Why the hell did he take his helmet off before getting out? And why wasn’t he wearing gloves?