midget01

Spooky Coincidence

August was a bad month in �75. I was at Grandview Speedway near Allentown, running with the ARDC midgets when the throttle stuck. What a scary feeling to let off and have the car still charging into the corner, engine winding hard. The brakes don�t slow the car much and overdriving the corner that hard made the car push straight toward the wall.

It hit and rode along the wall before coming down on the wheels without going over. When the car came to a

My car rides the 3rd turn fence.

stop at the bottom of the banking I sat there trying to realize what had happened. A track official come over and asked if I was OK. I said yes and he said �Then get out of the car!�. I must have been holding up the show.

It was the first time I crashed a race car. I had crashed in the karts before but never strapped in. As I sat in the car on the track I thought, �Is that all there is to crashing?� It actually gave me confidence to think I could go through that and not get hurt.

In the pits we loaded up the car; bent front axle, nerf bars, rear suspension but most everything else was OK. One of the other drivers came over and asked what happened. He said he thought I must have really been hooked up because he let off for the turn and here I came, flyin� by him into the corner still on the throttle, then I disappeared up the banking. We laughed.

Stevie Howard won the feature that nite. He was a young racer who was alreadywinning in midgets and was running up front in the sprints. The next week he died in a fiery crash at Lincoln Speedway in a sprint car.

That month we also lost Mark Donahue and Tiny Lund.

The strange thing for me was the picture in the next week�s racing paper showing the midget of John Gall riding the wall in a USAC race. The picture of his crash and mine looked much the same. We were the same age, racing midgets at about the same time, on the same night, in different states and we both had the throttle stick. I was lucky and walked away... John�s car went over the fence and he died. I didn�t know him but I�ve always remembered.

Bad things in racing seem to happen in streaks. That streak in August was a bad one. I was very fortunate.

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