Seventeen year old Minnesota native Gracie Lonergan is a racing rookie in 2017, but you wouldn’t know it watching her response to an incident this weekend at the Cedar Falls Raceway.
The second generation racer has been a staunch supporter of the racing careers of her father, Steve, and brother Mark Lonergan, but this season made it known she wanted to climb behind the wheel herself.
“I grew up around engines and learning how to wrench on them. I helped buckle them in and I helped on the farm with them. I had never really asked for much but I’ve always wanted to race,” she explains. “So this year I said I was tired of buckling them in and it was time I got out on that track. It took a few runs to get used to the feel of the car, course. But by the time I had gotten used to it, my family was calling me “the next Leah Pritchett,” because Leah is my idol.”
Gracie has clocked a number of laps in her 5-second (1/8-mile) dragster already this season, but none quite like the one she took on Sunday at Cedar Falls. With the relatively narrow rear end of her dragster, she and her father said it’s necessary to choose one side of the racing groove, but that the car won’t fit within the rubber footprints laid down by the wider door cars. While Gracie believed her position to the right of center in the groove initially led to her dragster losing traction and sashaying out of control and ultimately onto its side, after some time to reflect, the Lonergan’s feel the strong winds simply got ahold of the car.
In what can only be described as an impressive job of driving, a significant stroke of luck, and perhaps a bad job of crashing, Gracie’s dragster turned onto its left slide, struck the concrete retaining wall with its underside, and then gracefully turned back onto its wheels as if nothing happened at all.
The car, which has been as quick as 5.97-seconds, was going 115 mph when it rolled onto its side.
Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. For what seemed like three minutes sliding on my side, was actually about three seconds.
“I remember flipping on to my side and keeping on the throttle in hope that it would tip back up. And eventually it did. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion, for what seemed like three minutes sliding on my side, was actually about three seconds.”
Many drivers, even those with a lifetime of racing under their belts, will instinctively reach for anything solid in such an accident, but showing instincts beyond her age, Gracie says she made sure to keep her arms inside the cockpit and, at the first hint of pull from the steering wheel, released her grip to save her hands and fingers from injury.
When she finally rolled to a stop, she sat there, simply taken aback by what had just happened … and perhaps fully unable at the time to recognize how fortunate she was that it wasn’t any worse.
“My opponent, Jace Deering, had stopped at the end of the track and made sure I was okay. That showed true sportsmanship,” she says. “He shut off the switch to my engine for me and talked to me to get me to calm down. All I know is I couldn’t say any words, I was just breathing really heavily. He flipped up my visor on my helmet for me because it began to fog up from breathing so hard. Soon, a track official had came down to make sure I was okay. Then I heard my dad and stepmom coming. I got out of the dragster, of course shaking, and they took me on the guardrail. I took my helmet off and I couldn’t get my words out. I was in shock. I knew I wasn’t hurt. Just shook up.”
Gracie walked away without a scratch, and the dragster — which more often than not sustain major structural damage in rollovers and impacts — came away with only minor wounds: four bent rims, a bent left bank header, and a banged-up nose cone.
Gracie says they’ll be moving to a wider set of rear wheels and tires to help stabilize the car, and if all goes to plan, should be back at it in a couple of weeks.