Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 28, 1993 TAG: 9302280051
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: D10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ROCKINGHAM, N.C. LENGTH: Long
RACE-CAR ACROBATICS PUT DRIVERS ON THE EDGE
YOU KNOW HOW it is when you ride the Tilt-A-Whirl or the roller-coaster? Well, there are a few guys on the Winston Cup stock-car circuit who can teach you what it's really like to be heels over head.\ Rusty Wallace, NASCAR's king of flight, might be tempted to start his own frequent flyers club after his spectacular crash in the Daytona 500 two weeks ago.
His Pontiac Grand Prix flipped eight times down the backstretch on lap 169, including an incredible double-gainer when the car flipped end over end over end before touching the ground.
Flips are rare in modern Winston Cup racing, although there usually are one or two a year.
This, though, was Wallace's third tumble in 11 years. Every five years, he unwittingly has taken flying lessons in a wingless behemoth that weighs almost two tons. He flipped down the backstretch at Daytona in 1983 and tumbled down the front straight at Bristol in 1988.
His eight-flip crash at Daytona on Feb. 14, however, put him in NASCAR's all-time top 10 for number of somersaults.
What did it feel like to fly a stock car at Daytona?
"It was just a real wild-a-- ride," Wallace said Saturday while preparing for today's Goodwrench 500 at North Carolina Motor Speedway. "I was alert the whole time.
"I can't remember if I closed my eyes or not. I'm sure I did. But I was with it the whole time. I knew what was going on. It happened so fast. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Splat!. And then I'm OK.
"Every time I hit, I was just saying, `I hope this isn't a bad one here.' It would hit, and then it would go in the air. And when it would get ready to land, you just say to yourself, `Oh man, I hope this isn't going to be one of these death-defying, uncontrollable ones that knocks you out. And it never came. That's the part I liked."
Wallace crawled out with only two cuts under his chin that took six stitches to close. He clinched his head to his chest during the crash "and as I was crashing and hitting the ground, the sternum strap kept cutting on my chin," he said.
Of his three tumbles, "Bristol was the worst," he said, even though a short track flip is almost unheard of. "Bristol was concrete. Those were real hard hits. It whiplashed my neck and knocked me out."
\ `Ugghhhh!'
It is hoped there won't be a flip at Rockingham today, but it could happen. Bobby Allison proved that 17 years ago this month.
He flipped down the backstretch on lap 363 of the 1976 Carolina 500. The crash was so violent that one of his eyes popped out of its socket.
The car "wasn't handling worth a durn" in the air, Allison said from the hospital bed he occupied for three days after that crash.
More frequently than not, drivers are knocked out in flip crashes, but they usually are not gravely injured.
Ricky Rudd doesn't remember anything about the somersaulting pirouettes of his 1984 Busch Clash tumble - a crash that was probably the most stylishly spectacular of all time - but although it's been 10 years, he recalls every moment before he was knocked out and after he woke up about 30 seconds after the car stopped.
"The last thing I remember was going "Ugghhhh!!" as all of the air went out of my body when I landed for the first time," he said.
Darrell Waltrip knows how Rudd felt.
"Everything stops. You're not living every tumble," said Waltrip, who rolled his Chevrolet Lumina down the Daytona backstretch in 1991. "Basically, I don't remember any of it.
"It would be just like Mike Tyson cold-cocking you unexpectedly. It stuns you.
"When I looked at the tape about a week later, I cried. It scared me to death. I said, `Holy cow, that guy should have got killed.' "
\ Scared is the word
Davey Allison also doesn't remember everything about his terrifying crash at Pocono last July 19, although he was conscious most of the time.
"The last thing I remember, prior to climbing out of car, was seeing Kyle Petty upside down and thinking, `One of us is not going in the right direction,' " said Allison, who broke his right wrist, forearm and collarbone in the crash. "I do not remember all the flips.
"I remember the car becoming airborne and rolling over the first time. The next thing I remember was crawling out of the car.' '
Mark Martin says he never has been more scared than when he nearly flipped at Talladega in 1991.
"I personally am scared to death of turning over," he said. "I would have died of a heart attack if I had been in Davey's car at Pocono. I'm not afraid of hitting walls hard. It will ruin your body, and my body is about semi-ruined from hitting walls. That's natural. But upside down is not normal."
Last year at Talladega, Rick Mast flipped onto his roof, but that was it.
"While the accident was happening, it was kind of like a dream," he said. "I remember thinking, `Man, this ain't me!'
`The first thought I had when it went over was, `This thing is going to take off. It's going to be a heck of a ride.' So I closed my eyes. But it kept sliding and sliding and sliding. So I opened my eyes back up and took a peek. The picture was kind of black. It was all dark. So I shut my eyes again.
"Finally, it stopped sliding. And I sat there for a second and thought, `Whew! I gotta get out of here.' And it's amazing how long it takes to get out of the car when you're trying to get out fast."
\ But who's counting
For some reason, nearly every wild stock car tumble is always credited with more flips than actually occurred.
In Richard Petty's famous Daytona 500 crash of 1988 - perhaps the most widely seen stock-car crash in history - legend has it that he flipped a dozen times.
The videotapes, however, show only six or seven flips. But who's counting? After all, Petty got T-boned after he landed and spun around and around like a top.
Flips were more common in the early days of stock car racing, when those top-heavy production cars raced with little tires, often competing on rutty dirt tracks.
In the first crash of the first NASCAR stock car race, Lee Petty proved that his 1946 Buick Roadmaster was not built by Boeing.
Petty didn't just crash on that June day in 1949 at Charlotte Speedway. He flew. He flipped. He rolled. He somersaulted. In the words of stock car historian Greg Fielden, Petty "tumbled endlessly."
When Petty finally did land, he landed right side up. So he unbuckled his seat belt, got out of the car, sat down on the edge of the track and stared into space.
"I was just sitting there thinking about having to go home and explain to my wife where I'd been with the car," he said.
\ Roll down memory lane
In 1945 at Langhorne, Pa., driver Axel Anderson put the number 777 on his car for good luck. Some luck. He flipped several times, cut up his face and broke his skull.
Louise Smith was the first woman to flip. She did it in the second NASCAR race in 1949 and earned $25 from the purse for her effort.
Tim Flock has always been proud to say that he won the 1952 championship on his head. He had to start a race in West Palm Beach, Fla., to clinch the title, and he flipped on the 164th lap.
Ralph Moody flipped his car while running third in a 1956 race on the Daytona beach course. It landed on its wheels and he continued on, never losing a position.
Junior Johnson flipped in practice in Hickory, N.C., in 1959, then won the race.
One of the most famous early tumbles was by Cale Yarborough at Darlington in 1965 when he went out of the park. ABC's Wide World of Sports caught him sailing over the guardrail but missed the end-over-end flips.
"It was total terror," said Yarborough, who walked away from the crash.
He described the crash a few years ago in the "Close Calls" stock car crash video.
"All of a sudden," he said, "it got awful quiet in there and I looked around and saw a lot of grass. And I said, `Oh, boy, there ain't no grass on that race track.' I knew I was in deep trouble.
"When you go sailing, and you know that thing is going to hit and it's going to hit hard, and you've got time to think about it, that's a tough ride. That thing hit nose first and went end over end over end. And the car was absolutely demolished except right where I was sitting."
It was, he said, "the agony of defeat."
Keywords:
AUTO RACING