Over this past weekend, Denny Hamlin managed to upstage Nascar golden boy Jimmie Johnson at the Tums Fast Relief 500 at Martinsville Speedway as part of the current Nascar Sprint Cup chase series. Yeah, Hamlin's probably not going to win the championship this year (my prediction is Mr. Johnny Obvious aka Jimmie Johnson--look at the points advantage!), but still it's a career-highlight victory that stakes his claim as one of Nascar's stars. But while most drivers have their moments of brilliance, they usually also have at least a few moments in their career they'd rather forget and Denny Hamlin's just one of the many who've had a light brush with death. Today's video clip is just one of those scenarios.
This video is from a Nascar Nationwide race from earlier this year in Las Vegas. The clip cuts right to the chase and shows Denny Hamlin (in the No. 20 car) breaking a tire and getting entangled with Mike Bliss (cool name, eh?) and the car catches fire. Shortly the flames extinguish to only smoke, but still that's got to be a scary situation. The video follows up with the cleanup as well as multiple angles of the accident, and you can get the best look at the No. 20 car's combustion about the 2:15 mark.
My final web video blog dedicated to some of the scariest car fires in modern auto racing history, we have this video that isn't accompanied by much supplementary information, but it's almost irrelevant - this is one of the baddest crashes in auto racing. The conditions are rainy and misty, and at first we just see a car skid off to the side of the track. But that's just the calm before the storm. As the car just sits there, all of a sudden at the :27 mark another vehicle plows right into the skidded car, resulting in an awe-inspiring fiery explosion the likes of which most have never seen before. I can only hope that no one was seriously injured or worse as a result of this horrendous wreck.
As we have seen thus far this week in my blog, auto racing crashes that lead to car fires are pretty scary. But as today's video shows, perhaps what's even more frightening is a car fire that seemingly comes out of nowhere...and that's exactly what happens in this video from pit lane at Road America.
This web video from YouTube doesn't come along with a whole lot of additional information (date, name of race, driver, etc), but that doesn't really matter. No matter what year, what driver or how big the event, nothing could possibly be more terrifying to a driver and his crew is to pull up for a routine pit stop and all of a sudden have the vehicle catch fire. The car pulls up at about the :25 second mark, and all of a sudden the damn car goes up in a blaze and nearly catches the pit crew on fire as well. This goes to prove it doesn't take a car collision or crash into a wall to make one of these high powered racing vehicles turn into a lethal weapon.
This week my video blog is dedicated to some of the wildest and scariest car fires in modern racing, and a tribute to the brave men and women who risk their lives driving these dangerous vehicles for us spectators. Today's video comes from a 2003 NASCAR race at Chicagoland in 2003, and features Sprint Cup Series driver Bobby Labonte.
This web video here wastes no time getting to the thick of the action as right at the beginning you can see Labonte's car spinning and smoking as it hits the wall and catches fire. The vehicle rolls backwards, managing to miss most other cars as it careens to a stop near the center of the track. Labonte then struggles to get out of the driver side window, but thankfully manages to escape with not much more than a bruised ego.
Let's face it--auto racing can be dangerous. And there probably isn't anything scarier to a driver than being in a car going over 100 mph, crashing, and having the thing catch fire. So as a tribute to the brave men and women of auto racing who risk their lives every time they hit the track, I am dedicating this week's blog post to some of the scariest car fires in modern Nascar history.
The catalyst that led to me doing this week's post on car fires and their brave surviving drivers came from reading an article about 2008 Craftsman Truck Series champion Johnny Benson's homecoming race earlier this month that ended in a wreck that caused his car to catch fire. Benson got his SuperModified vehicle tangled up with Larry Leonard's during the second lap and almost instantly silenced Benson's hometown crowd at Berlin Raceway in Grand Rapids, Mich. Benson was taken to a local hospital where he was treated for burns, broken ribs, and a punctured lung. According to his fan club's Web site, Benson recently returned home to North Carolina and is doing better than expected. I'm certain we all wish Johnny Benson a very speedy recovery and hope to see him on the race track again soon.
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