This one qualified as an actual nightmare unfolding right before my very eyes. It was one of those nights at the drag strip that just wasn’t going all that great from the git-go and this incident was the icing on a very crappy cake.
The track operator was fretting all day because it was threatening rain from about three hours prior to the gates opening and he was fearing that the crowd would be non-existent for the much-hyped match race. He was right, the crowd was terrible. Add to the fact that multiple oildowns during qualifying had blown the schedule all to hell, and you had a guy running track that was in need of a bottle of Zoloft.
We were running a local class called Pro Comp based loosely on the old NHRA Pro Comp category. It’s a heads-up eliminator that featured everything from blown Altereds to injected Funny Cars and everything in between. The fans loved it, and before the Top Dragster class took hold it provided some great side by side action.
One of the racers competing was a guy named Ola Nordell. He was from Norway originally but lived in Connecticut. His stuff was nice and he was a smart engineering type. In fact, he was using some kind of infrared sensors to monitor tire growth and squat during his runs. He was working on some stuff that allowed him to tune the car for maximum traction and it would also monitor wheel spin as well. This will be important in a minute.
Shockingly, we had not had any rain, though it seemed the vibes being thrown off of the zoomi-piped dragsters were about to shake some loose. This was before the days of wireless Internet in drag race towers so this track actually paid for a radar service. We had a television monitor mounted on the wall with a modem-like deal hooked to it. There was live radar, updated every 5-10 minutes. As the storms were tracking, we looked like we were going to be the recipient of a miracle and the storms would blow past.
It came time for Nordell to make his run, along side a racer named Don Johnson (not the Miami Vice guy) who was running a blown alky dragster. They completed their burnouts and were rolling toward the staging beams and I specifically remember thinking, “It’s freaking amazing that it has not rained yet.”
The two cars staged and I swear, just as the tree flashed a guy from the top end said, “We’ve got drops.” The manager yelled to the starter to throw the reds, but it was too late. Both cars launched off at the exact second the drops began hitting the track.
For those of you who have never been on a treated strip after it rains, it’s like an ice hockey rink. Luckily for Johnson, he smoked the tires on the hit and shut his car off. Nordell, in the car equipped with the traction sensors, powered right into the rain and instantly the car went into wild left-to-right yawing motions. The car then turned 90 degrees and smashed into the wall, actually climbing the thing and sliding on its side and the roll cage hoop to a stop.
It was an insane set of circumstances. The radar showed us being clear and some small low-level shower popped up out of nowhere. It was just sickening to be in the tower and everyone felt about as awful as we could. Nordell was not exactly excited about the prospect of driving into a rain storm either. Luckily he was not hurt but the dragster was bent up pretty good.
Needless to say, for years after that incident the manager was rain-phobic!
