For this week’s installment I do not have video or good photos (the photo above is not even the incident I’m talking about), but in many ways the story stands on its own. Long story short, I watched a guy drive a blown Altered into a tree.

This particular car has always been a personal favorite. It’s a little short-wheelbase Altered with an honest small-block Chevy in it, 355ci to be exact. It’s packing an 8-71 blower that is overdriven to the moon and runs alcohol injection. The car can run down into the 7s, and every time it does, the guy is wrestling the wheel and really manhandling the car down the track. It acts like an Altered should.

Back when the owner was getting the car sorted out he was playing with the location of the parachutes. After moving them around on the body, more for aesthetics’ sake than anything else, he settled on a position that was fairly low in the rear. I’m not an aerodynamic expert, but I have seen lots of drag cars, and this location just seemed a bit off from the hundreds of other similar cars I had seen in the past. Turns out there’s a reason.

The car was on a great pass, right down into the low-7-second area and I watched from the tower as the ‘chutes deployed and were promptly sucked back underneath the car, and when that happened they managed to wrap themselves around the rear brake rotors, and since those were the only two stoppers on the car, it was bad news for the driver.

The good news is that he was careening toward a massive sand trap that would bring a quick, albeit messy and sandy end to his excursion. I’m watching from the tower with my binoculars now, tracking his progress and getting ready to let the people know that he was “in the beach” and ok. Then he went all Jackie Stewart on me and managed to drive this car, which was still hauling the mail, onto a strip of ground, just about as wide as his car itself to the extreme right of the sand trap. It was a miracle he completed the maneuver without rolling the car.

So now, still traveling more than 50 mph by the reports of the top-end crew, he was driving next to the sand trap, on hard packed ground, and then poof, he was gone into the woods.

Like something from the movies he blasted into the woods and the branches, brush, and brambles closed right back up behind him like he was just swallowed by a giant green monster. He didn’t get that far in because shortly after entering the forest, like 50 yards shortly, he center punched a mighty oak tree, mangling the front of the car and tweaking the front half of the chassis. The body work on the car was also ready for the Presidential special at Maaco as well.

The safety crew ran to the scene and while dragging him out of the car they asked why he drove around the sand. His reply?  “It was going to be a real pain in the ass to get the car clean from all the sand.”

I guess it was going to be easier for the chassis shop to front half the car and build new body panels for it.

Lesson of the day? Sand soft. Tree hard.