A hellish quarter-mile ride on the NHRA’s longest racetrack, with flames taunting him and billowing black smoke nearly choking him, convinced Dan Stevenson. His time behind the wheel of a wild, nitrous-fed Pro Mod was over.

Know this – there will forever be a battle in Pro Mod between power adders. Many nitrous warriors believe their power adder is superior, and in the right hands, safe.

However to Stevenson, the Lisle, Illinois, owner-driver’s new vow at the Pro Mod season-opening Gatornationals at Gainesville, Florida, is ‘bring on the turbos’. Stevenson is not done with racing. Not yet.

He didn’t miss a beat on the J&A Service Pro Modified Drag Racing Series tour. He purchased Jerry Bickel’s turbocharged Camaro that Rickie Smith had been scouting in a flirtatious turbo-tryst that didn’t work out.

So far, it has been a promising match, even if it is a match made from mayhem.

“It was a typical run,” Stevenson said of the start of his ill-fated pass at Gainesville. “About two and a half seconds into the run, there was a pop – not a bang, not the hood scoop blowing up. It was a pop, and instantly the car was on fire. I’ve been through a lot of fires with my Pro Mod, but I knew right away that there was no way this was going out. So I pulled the fire bottles right away and that kind of knocked it down a little bit. But then it started again. By that time, the fuel cell was on fire. It burned the lines off at the firewall. And now you’ve got 1,000 pounds of pressure that is blowing right in, feeding the fire. So I go for the parachutes – no parachutes, because the parachutes run off of nitrous.”

He said the parachutes are designed like that “because back in the ADRL days, when we were trying to take every ounce out of the car, we figured we could get rid of seven or eight pounds with the bottle and it has worked. This one time, it was a bad thing.

“So no parachutes – then you go for the brakes. The brakes go to the floor – no brakes. The brake lines had burned through because the fire was so hot,” Stevenson said. “Now you’re going 140 miles per hour with no parachutes and no brakes and you’re on fire. What do you do?”

Pray?

“There’s no time for that. I mean, you try to keep your composure, keep the car in your own lane, because you don’t want to get over in somebody else’s. The right side of the car was pretty much engulfed in flames. I couldn’t hit the wall, because if you do and you bounce and you wind up on the driver’s door in the left lane, you ain’t going to get out the other side,” Stevenson said, recalling his split-second reasoning. “So I waited it out until it was slow enough that I thought I could put it into the wall and get it stopped.

“It was just a struggle,” he said, “because as soon as you stop, you throw the door open and the fire bottles pretty much take the oxygen out of the car. So now, when you open the door and let the oxygen in, the flames come in with it. Now you’re faced with ‘Do I stay here or do I go?’ You’ve got a wall of fire you’ve got to get through. I got part-way out of the car and the Safety Safari was there and kind of knocked the fire down enough and dragged me the rest of the way out. I got a couple of breaths of smoke, which didn’t go down very well. You wouldn’t live in there very long in those conditions, I can tell you that.

“So I’ve learned a few lessons. One is I won’t ever get back in a nitrous Pro Mod. Why? I’ve been on fire so many times, some [incidents] worse than others, but that was enough to make you sit back and think, ‘Why am I doing this? I have a wife and kids and grandkids. And it’s pretty selfish,’ ” he said.

He phoned his wife from the ambulance, and, he said, “Of course, she’s flipping out.” But during his four-hour stay at the hospital, his wife of 40 years helped him put his feelings in perspective as he experienced a swing of emotions. As he underwent testing and treatment and had time to sort out the events that landed him there, Stevenson said he thought, “That’s it. I’m done.”

He and his wife spoke again and she asked, “Are you done?” Conflicted, he said, “I don’t know.” Then she told him, “I won’t say one word if you build another car.” (Said Stevenson, “I got a good one [wife]. She loves me enough to let me chase my dreams.”)

After he was released from the hospital, he said he decided during dinner with crew chief Chuck Samuel and his crew, “I’m not done – I can’t go out like that. I don’t want that to be my last memory in a race car, burning it to the ground.”

So, thanks to Smith admittedly being turbocharger-impaired and not particularly cozy with computers, Stevenson took the chance to switch to a turbo-powered car.

Although this newest iteration of the Stevenson Crane Service Chevy Camaro is the result of a staggering 600 hours of extra work adjusting its electrical and mechanical nuances to suit Stevenson himself, it has been worth it.

“Initially, it appears to me that running the turbo car is easier,” he said. “There’s less maintenance. With a nitrous car, we’ve got the heads off all the time. It’s a lot of work. But nitrous racers are kind of hard-headed. ‘We’re going to show you that we can do this.”

Besides, he agreed with Smith, who hadn’t been shy in complaining the NHRA’s rules favor the turbocharged cars to the certain detriment of the nitrous stalwarts and even the supercharged set.

“Do I think the turbo cars have an advantage? Yeah! Coming from nitrous,” Stevenson said. “When Rickie went a 70-whatever in Atlanta a couple of years ago and they hung 50 pounds on us, that cost me about $300,000. It was a big deal.”

It’s a moot point for him now. With guidance from Precision turbo’s Harry Hruska, whom he called before he purchased Bickel’s car to get a primer on driving and maintaining turbo-powered Pro Mods, Stevenson is developing a rhythm. He said Hruska has driven several times from his Northern Indiana shop to Stevenson’s race shop at Bolingbrook, Illinois, to help him get started with the new systems: “He has been over-the-top nice to us. It’s not like he’s giving us tune-up information or anything. But he has been very helpful with driving tips and what to expect.”

Despite clocking a respectable 5.99-second, 246 mph pass in testing at Tulsa before the second race of the season, at Houston, Stevenson battled his new ride at Royal Purple Raceway (it kept wanting to ease left) and missed the cut by just .041 of a second.

He said those testing numbers represented “a good place to start,” and the problem at Houston seemed to indicate that it “doesn’t have enough pre-load or rear steer in it.”

He made adjustments for Race No. 3 at Atlanta Dragway two weeks later and struggled still with the set-up. He experienced another DNQ, ranking 23 among the 27 entrants (although he was in outstanding company, with Mike Castellana, Jim Whiteley, and Chip King behind him and Mike Knowles, Jim Bell, Bob Rahaim, and Mike Janis also failing to qualify). Just the same, Stevenson isn’t giving up on his new car.

“It’s a good car, for sure. It’s got all the right stuff in it,” Stevenson said. “I’m driving it pretty well, for [having] just a few laps on it. To run a 5.99 really the first time that we got it to a decent racetrack, it’s not stellar, but it’s pretty damn good, because you know there’s a whole lot more left in it. We’re just trying to get it down the racetrack and get data. We’re not trying to set low e.t. – not yet. I believe Chuck’s a pretty good tuner. He’s got a lot of turbo experience.”

Stevenson, the turbo trainee, has a lot of experience rebounding. He came back from a 2014 wall-banging crash at Atlanta. He has resolved to remain strong for his family in the losses of a son, his father, his father- and mother-in-law, and a sister-in-law in a 10-year span.

“You live through that, it makes you stronger. You have to be strong for your kids and your wife,” Stevenson said. “That makes me who I am, I guess.” The 2002 loss of his son inspired the red dog decal on the back window of the race car. “That’s my guardian angel,” he said, believing that angel was watching over him at Gainesville.

“I was lucky. I had one scratch up here,” he said, pointing to his forehead. “I don’t even know where it came from. Other than that … a little bit of smoke inhalation … but physically I’m OK. I have an angel – more than one, maybe.”

With his understanding wife, a big extended family he takes every winter to spend two weeks on his boat moored at Key West, Florida, Stevenson said, “I’m lucky in life. I don’t have a lot of racing luck. I wish I had that golden horseshoe.”

Maybe this new car will behave. He’s counting on it.

“This is what I want to do,” Stevenson said. “I just turned 60. I’m not going to do this forever. My clock’s running. I’m in the fourth-quarter, and I’m not going out without some success.”