mid-70s, clear day, perfect day for racing. tommy adams was the driver of the yellow car, the 69 camaro, and david hugo was the driver of the lumina in the right lane. the drivers get the green light and the race starts as it is supposed to. when the cars took off down the track, everything looked so smooth. both cars lobbed side to side, no unnecessary fishtailing and no stupid moves at all at that point in time. everything looked like it was going as normal for a drag race. gayland has been a friend and a competitor of both drivers for years having raced against them several times. he has great respect for their skills. tommy haas been racing since 69. he was a true racer. if the tracks were opened and there was something going on, he was there. david hugo was a smooth driver. they had a team that would do anything for you. as far as i know, tommy adams nor david hugo has ever, ever had an accident up until that day.
both drivers flawless track records are about to take a major hit with a heart stopping collision all caught on camera. it looked like his car moved out of the right toward the guardrail and tommy looked like he was going right down his lane and david s car actually darted across the track and kind of hit tommy adams car in the corner panel which sent tommy s car right. we knew that was bad. in the business of drag racing, everything could change in a fraction of a second. when david s car steers into tommy s, traveling at 150 miles per hour, that s all it takes for things to go seriously wrong. tommy cut across the guardrail, and when it went right off the track into the grass, there was a small hump right there when you went off the track and he hit it, he hit it just right. the car just started barrel rolling. it went up in there and just started flipping. it looked like it was going faster there than it was actually on the race track.
you don t know until he goes to the hospital and gets checked out. when the care flight helicopter comes, that s as bad as it can get. the care flight helicopter rushes tommy to the closest trauma center. david, the driver who hit him, is uninjured and devastated about his friend. he was probably one of the most upset people there. i guess he felt like he might have been the cause of it or whatever. it actually, emotionally, scarred him to the point where he really lost the excitement and didn t want to get back in the race car again. the horrible accident leave spectators in shock and leads to a lot of second guessing and finger pointing among racing pros. it would be easier to say one of the drivers may have drove a little over his head or something, but we didn t see anything unordinary. it could have been parts failure, it could have been something that got underneath the tire. we really don t know. it happened so quick and so fast that it s hard to say exactly what happene
back at the station i walked in the door and i had a big grin on my face and i said, you guys have to see this. the jaws were dropped. the footage rob shot goes viral, garnering more than 1.5 million hits on youtube. since the wreck, the ramp has been redesigned to better ensure truck driver safety. to this day, rob still marvels at how he wound up at the right place at the right time, even though it was the wrong place and wrong time for the driver. the fact that i had my camera set up and pointed towards the ramp when the truck was coming down. i can t imagine i am speechless. the timing couldn t have been more perfect. you never think that anything like this is going to happen when you are going out on a shoot. coming up, a base jumper overextends himself with brutal consequences.
kind of a strange thing to see a 3,000-pound car 20 feet in the air flipping. it wasn t supposed to be that way and it didn t look right. a drag racer since he was 14 years old, gaylon is no stranger to crashes. he even had a scary one himself in 2010, also caught on camera. so he knows what tommy is going through. losing control of the car as a driver kind of gives you an eerie feeling. hold on and stop breathing and see where you re going. because at that point in time, you re probably running over 100-mile-an-hour and you really don t know what s happening, like we wrecked that car, i can imagine what he s going through. probably felt like somebody was beating him to death. back in seely, david rushes down to his friend where paramedics are already working on him. they got his helmet off and they checked all of his vitals and checked all of his signs and they weren t sure if he had a concussion or neck injury or head injury or back injury. it was kind of crazy. at that point