into the side of your car and think it s a slide job. that s when fist fights start sometimes. drivers and their crews go through painstaking efforts to set their cars up to handle slide jobs efficiently based on track conditions, and if any of their calculations are off, bad stuff happens. kevin did what we call a bicycle where the car actually hooked up and it tipped forward on two wheels. the car nosed over and he hooked the right front tire and that catapulted the car into a series of end-over-end flips. it s not uncommon for these cars to tip or even flip but bicycling is rare. the interesting thing about the crash is that when kevin hit the k-rail, which is this cement wall behind me, i suspect that probably one of his tires kind of rebounded him up off the k-rail. kevin s car is thrown into the air and out of the racetrack.
him precariously on this wire fence. the start of the accident was very common. the end of the accident was very, very shocking. photographer mike truex has been shooting racing from his perch up on the scoreboard for more than 15 years. passionate about the sport, mike has intimate knowledge about the racing experience. 80 miles an hour around the top of the racetrack, mud flying, driver s arms flailing. it s insane. and if sprint car racing is insane from mike s vantage point, imagine how insane it is to drive. just think of the scariest thing you ve ever done ever in your life, holding on for dear life, and it almost takes somebody a little crazy to do these, to drive these things. number 4 driver tony jones has sprint car racing in his blood. his father was also a driver, and during the course of his 16 years of professional racing,
tony s had his share of crashes. one of my worst crashes, the car is a little too tight, you know, flipped pretty good, hit the cage on the ground, and next thing you know i woke up in a c.a.t. scan. you don t know if you re in a coffin, talking to god or what s really going on. there are many challenges in this sport and the potential for danger is great. sprint car racing is done on dirt tracks which makes it very different from pavement racing. track owners go to great lengths to keep the track moist and sticky to enable drivers the signature sprint car style called a slide job. a slide job is when you start at the bottom you know, the end of the turn and end up in the top on the next turn. some guys don t really know how to pull off slide jobs. some guys just know how to drive
sprint car racing is a sport that s all about taking risks. i think the reason that kevin ended up flipping his race car as violently as he did is kevin and his crew made a guess about setup on the car. they made a guess on how fast that car could get through the corner and how they could adjust the race car in order to get him through that corner, and i think they guessed wrong. but experienced drivers like tony know, you ve got to take the spills with the thrills. that s part of racing. ask anybody in this pit. that s part of this deal. if you go fast, that s going to happen. some guys are fortunate and some guys get themselves in bad positions. coming up two gymnasts learn the laws of physics the hard way. we knew it was going to be dangerous. i just remember hitting the horse, being in a huge amount of pain.
you are in a confined area. you have gasoline and any time you have fuel in a vehicle, possibility of a fire. this competition is a timed course, where drivers receive penalties for errors like hitting cones or going out of bounds. if you accomplish that course in enough time, then you had time to go try the bonus line. bob runs through the course without a hitch, and approaches a 20-point bonus obstacle aptly named the wall. crawler went up a little ways, slid down, so we backed up. the natural thing you do, you re going to hit it just a little bit faster. the second attempt yields the same results. bob backs up a bit and hits the gas for a third try. no dice. with time running out, bob decides to push it even harder. we re just going to get into the throttle and let s see if it will get over it.