Attention in the pits! Drag Racing Hall of Fame announcer (and BangShift.com forum member) Jon Lundberg is credited with making that phrase standard operating procedure for every drag racing announcer in America. I mean it in a slightly different manner here, though, along the lines of paying attention in the pits because not all wrecks happen on the track. Here are two examples.

The first involves a Sportsman dragster being warmed up in the pits while lifted up on a floor jack. Of course track rules state that jackstands need to be in use at all times and any time that a car is running, someone should be in it. Neither piece of advice was being followed when a talented local racer was going over his car.

After getting the motor warm, the driver decided to put it in gear to warm up it the trans and rearend before heading to the staging lanes for the first round of qualifying. With the car in gear and the rear tires off the ground he brought up the RPM steadily. He did this to the point that the slicks started to grow and eventually one hit the ground and launched the car forward, causing him to be run over by his own driverless car. The car petered out pretty quickly and nudged the back wall of his trailer before stopping. The driver had some burns where the headers got him and had major black marks from the hot slicks running over his dumb ass as well. Hey dummy! Use the jackstands and have someone in the car.

Unfortunately, someone being in the car isn’t always the answer. On a completely different weekend there was a racer struggling mightily with his delay box, trans-brake release, or some other function that was causing him to be very late leaving the line. The driver spent a couple hours devising a solution to the problem.

Finally, he thought he had it licked and decided to try his trans brake in the pits, at the end of his trailer ramp, facing in towards the trailer. You can see where this is going.

He engaged the button and the car held for a couple seconds, and when the motor was really working and ready for a typical launch, it did. The car went straight into his trailer at full tilt, then three-quarters of the way out the back wall. It was a horrible noise. Problem two was that now the car was stuck and driver was stuck inside of it. After some frantic moments he got out, although he probably wanted to curl up and die in there.  

The car was really messed up, the trailer we toast, and the fact that he was stopped by the back end of his pretty new truck meant that this was one expensive mistake. If he had chosen a deserted part of the pits of section of the return road to do this on, there would have been no problem.

The moral of the story is to think before you do something that may result in your death.