The death of a drag racing fan in Phoenix has been weighing heavily on my mind, mostly because I look at this poor lady's demise as something that was completely avoidable.
It was the first round of Top Fuel eliminations when championship contender Antron Brown pulled to the line to race part-timer Troy Buff. Brown had the higher qualified car and was a heavy favorite to win the race but when he stepped on the gas his car went into violent tire shake, a condition caused when the tune-up is trying to put too much power down on the track and the tire simply can't grip the racing surface.
The usual remedy for tire shake is to "pedal" the throttle by taking your foot off the gas for a nano-second, letting the tire calm down, and then stepping on the gas again, which is what Brown did. The problem occurred at this point when the extreme pressure of his 7,000-horsepower dragster caused his left rear tire to separate from the rear end assembly.
At that point, the giant Goodyear tire and rim was on its own and it bounced down the track, over the retaining wall and a section of grandstands, and into the pro pits. It then struck and killed a female spectator, who was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.
Surprisingly, at least to me, the NHRA continued the race. The only reprieve the obviously rattled group of drivers had was a few rain delays.
As always seems to be the case with NHRA teams, ideas of how to prevent this from ever happening again were quickly bantered about. The first thought was to figure out a way to tether the wheels to the rear-end assembly but those in the know pointed to the fact other racing series continue to have problems with tethering systems. Plus, tethering wheels would be a costly proposal.
With hindsight being 20/20, the next painfully obvious solution was to simply add more wheel studs and make them thicker. As Top Fuel driver and esteemed engineer Tim Gibson pointed out to me, the current wheel stud configuration calls for just five wheel studs per wheel and the studs are just 11/16ths of an inch in diameter. Gibson guesses those specs date back to the early 1970s.
My neighbor has a Ford pick-up and it has eight studs per wheel. I'm no engineer but it seems like eight would be better than five. And Gibson's idea of making the studs thicker makes perfect sense also. Best of all, he assures me this would be a fairly inexpensive fix. He now owns a wheel company so he knows what he's talking about.
One of the top drivers I spoke with on the subject also suggested some sort of male/female mounting bracket where the estimated 5,000 foot pounds of torque would be driving this new interlocking piece and thus the wheel itself, instead of trying to drive all that horsepower through the wheel studs alone. This is another great idea.
While this is the first time in my 13 years on tour that I can recall a fan being killed by debris, it is certainly something that could have happened before. Dan Wilkerson lost a wheel last year. Tony Schumacher shot a front tire down the track a few years back that ended up inside a rig parked on the infield. Pat Dakin had a tire bounce into a spectator area years ago in Topeka. It happens.
To the NHRA's credit, they have a lengthy history of responding well to tragedy and making the necessary changes to prevent similar accidents from happening again. And they usually make the changes in a very timely manner. I pray they move quickly on this problem.
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