It has been a while since we have peeked in on the Carbon Video YouTube channel and we’re glad that we did. He published a compilation video featuring 10-minutes of spectator drags crashes at his home stomping ground which is Beech Ridge Speedway in Maine. We have seen a couple of these things before but the vast majority of them are completely new to us. There are sport compacts, trucks, hot rods, muscle cars, and more eating walls, tires, and each other in some of these crackups.
There are similarities to many of them and since we’re just armchair quarterbacking this stuff, we’ve got to guess that the slight banking of the oval is one of the things that throws so many of these drivers off and into making mistakes that ultimately cause them to smash their junk up…right? It seems that steering an throttle inputs that would work on a flat road or flat course get exaggerated and the car does not react in the same way when it has a slight pitch to it. At least that’s what it looks like to us. That and the fact some of the people are clearly trying to showboat with a massive drift or they are carrying stupid amounts of speed into corners and have no idea that they too are subject to the laws of physics like the rest of us.
We’re glad everyone walks away from these, especially the roll over. That one is bad. The awesome hot rod with the wide fives that hits the wall hard is another one that’s a pretty tough knock. The big guy driving the hot rod seems to get out rather slowly after that one and he was probably sore the next day.
So if you are thinking of taking on the spectator drags at your local track in 2018 just watch this video and do the opposite of all these guys…literally.
The Eclipse at the 3:00 mark is from Seekonk in MA.
Reminds me of the racing scene in “On the Beach” (1959) where everybody on the track is trying to kill themselves before they die from nuclear war radiation.
Do they have spectator drags out here in the west?