So, you want to drive a Funny Car, huh?
Made famous by their untamed and unpredictable nature, Funny Cars at every performance level are still among the most difficult machines to pilot — if not the THE most challenging — throwing finesse out the window and often requiring all-out manhandling to wrestle them to the finish stripe in one piece. That wild and wooly nature was, terrifyingly enough, on full display last weekend at the Northland Dodge Motorsports Park in Prince George, BC, Canada, where the Rocky Mountain Nostalgia Funny Cars were the headline attraction for the Full Blown Weekend racing event. And where racers Landon Goudreau and Jimmy Fersch put on a kind of show they had never envisioned.
Squaring off in the final round of eliminations of the Funny Car category (a 6.90 index eliminator), was Goudreau in his Plymouth Arrow-bodied Wild West flopper and Fersch in his Big West Barracuda. Goudreau had run a too-quick 6.81 in the earlier round of racing, but was placed into the final when the No. 1 qualifier, Cory Kincaid, was unable to answer the bell, the setting up the fateful run.
As the pair charged down track, Goudreau’s mount got loose over a bumpy section of the racing surface near half track, forcing him to lift off the throttle to keep the car in his own lane. Unfortunately, the momentum was already carrying him across the centerline and right into the path of Fersch, and despite his evasive maneuvers to avoid the oncoming Barracuda, the pair made contact at a very high rate of speed — Goudreau striking the right rear wheel of the ‘Cuda and sending Fersch up onto two wheels in wild fashion at close to 200 miles per hour.
Luckily, Fersch’s car return to earth safely without striking either of the guardrails, but Goudreau wasn’t so fortunate, as the ricocheting momentum of the contact with Fersch sent him careening back to the right, where he struck the concrete barrier with a ton of force, clearly lifting the entire rear end of the car off the ground in the process. The subsequent hit and grind down the concrete did extensive damage to Goudreau’s beautiful racer, and surely rattled his cage, but both drivers were, miraculously, free of any serious harm in the melee.
Video credit: Mark Duthie/Next Level Media