Dragzine

When you first read the title given to this video you may be thinking aloud “a Funny Car did what?” But once you see it, that’s about the best description you’ll be able to come up with. Unfortunately, the crew member that got sucked into the mouth of this flopper the 1/8 mile Barona Dragstrip in El Cajon, California, had nothing more than his pride hurt, and even left a comment on YouTube under the video explaining the occurrence and what happened.

After the driver has completed his burnout procedure and backed up, the crew member – who also happens to be drivers son – lifts the body for the crew to make final adjustments before staging. At this point, a stud in the supercharger that had come loose for undetermined reasons got sucked in through the injector, cracking the blower casing and lifting the injector.  This chain reaction opened the butterflies and lurched the car forward with the body still held high. At this point, there can be no great outcome for this poor crew man. The nose of the chassis takes his feet right out from under him as he falls face first into the car, the body toppling down and gobbling him right up.

We’ve seen situations like this other occur in the past, however, those often involve the throttle linkage being tripped by the body as the crewman raises it. One of more publicized scenes was that of Tony Pedregon at Indianapolis in 2005, when crewman Cody Pendergrass was nearly trampled on the starting line before the car plowed into the center retaining wall.