In the realm of drag racing crashes, this is one of the more violent ones that we have ever seen. Filmed at Orlando Speed World drag strip, it features a 1953 (or thereabouts) bodied Top Sportsman car performing a burnout, backing up, and then launching into an incredible crash less than 200 feet down the strip. There is no exact reason given but from watching the video several times we’re going to speculate that an axle broke because when you watch things start to go bad, the left rear tire is spinning and smoking while the right rear is doing nothing. The car then drives itself left very hard and actually rotates on its own axis. The car then crosses the track heading for the right guard wall (it launched in the left lane looking down the track). As the car is heading across the track you can hear the throttle go to almost wide open again an instant before the car impacts the wall in a nearly head on fashion. The impact is quite literally shocking.

As the car bounces off the wall is flops around before stopping right side up, back in the right lane. Earlier today we showed you a video of a high horsepower drag pass when everything goes right and marveled at just how beautiful that run was. This time we’re looking at a situation where it all went wrong and it went wrong so fast and so violently that the driver has absolutely no shot to stop what’s going on. The thing looked OK on the burnout so maybe it snapped the axle on the initial hit of the throttle when the tree came down? It is impossible to know just from peeking at video. We believe that the driver is OK because have a hard time believing that the chassis company which posted the video would do so unless he was. The guy had to have had his bell rung pretty good though.

What makes this video creepier than most to watch is the proximity of the impact to the starting line. Normally we see cars center punch the wall like this at the top end when the rear of the car washes out or becomes unhappy. From a distance it always looks bad but when it happens this close to the starting line it looks downright terrifying.

Thanks to Elon for the tip!

NOTE — THE VIDEO HAS APPARENTLY BEEN REMOVED….WORKING TO FIND IT AGAIN