The Firebird Raceway out in Boise, Idaho held its annual Halloween Classic over the weekend, featuring, among other things, a wheelstand contest in the midst of the five-day long drag racing event. And, much like those who compete at the world famous Byron Wheelstanding Contest in Illinois, the Idahoans know how to let it all hang out to get the crowds’ votes. Because these days, your everyday wheelstand just won’t do…it’s go big (with little regard for tearing your stuff up) or go home.

There’s nothing in the rules at any of these organized wheelstand contests that says you can’t enter a dragster, an altered, or anything else, but traditionally, the fields are comprised entirely of doorslammers. Perhaps it’s because other forms of drag racing machinery just aren’t cut out for the big air, or perhaps those with very purpose-built race chassis just don’t want to destroy their cars. We’ll go with the latter, but for one racer, none of that really mattered.

Scott West, at the controls of his ’23 T Altered and perhaps slightly insane, entered the car into the wheelstand contest, and even removed the wheelie bars, proving he was in it to win it. And the fact that he didn’t win it is shocking, as he got all four wheels clear off the ground by the sixty-foot mark, riding only on the tail section of the bodywork out nearly 200 feet, crashing down in the lane opposite of the one he started in. A hell of an effort that should come with bonus points for entering a form of race car no one else would.

In the end, the winner was former Halloween Classic wheelstand contest champion Jamie Debensten in his supercharged Camaro, who put the nose in the clouds not once, but twice — at one point sticking the car on a single wheel before taking out a timing block in a back-breaking crash-landing.

Videos by Chuck Argon