There are a few things that we hold self-evident around here and one of them is that no matter what is done to advance technology and reliability in the nitro ranks, stuff will still blow up. Robert Hight suffered one of the biggest funny car explosions since Jack Beckman blew one to smithereens at Epping, New Hampshire earlier this year.
While lined up next to Dave Richards during Saturday night qualifying, Robert was on a solid run when all of a sudden the car annihilated itself in the timing lights. The concussion from the blast took the car and blasted it right into the other lane where Hight nearly got tangled up with Richards but amazingly missed him by a very small margin.
I did an on track interview with Hight after TV’s John Kernan spoke with him and as he told Kernan, there was absolutely no warning for this one. After the fact there was some video that shows the team pulling apart what was left of the engine and one head was completely missing an intake valve. If the head of the valve broke off and allowed the flame travel to enter the intake manifold and supercharger, that would surely cause a monstrosity like this.
Hight was absolutely fine and his team was going to thrash all night to get him ready for Sunday qualifying and the Traxxas $100,000 funny car shootout. It’ll be interesting to see how the AAA team fares today in that exciting contest.
So you want to be a funny car driver, eh? You better be ready to handle something like this while at “work”.
OK looks like Robert is the real big chief