Key Kelley’s debut outing with radials on his familiar screw-supercharged JangAlang Buick Regal didn’t end quite the way he had hoped over the weekend at Big Jake Promotions’ March Mania 5 event at Xtreme Raceway Park in Ferris, Texas.

The standout Street Outlaws star, still running on a high from a huge Pro Modified victory at the Snowbird Outlaw Nationals in December and subsequent competitive outings in the class with his Chevrolet Camaro. Kelley decided to bolt radials onto the Regal to take part in the highly competitive “Bear Sh-t Only” no-time 275 class, with a huge $105,000 payday on the line. With Jeff Pierce calling the tuning shots and Adam Drzayich in town to lend his expert support, Kelley made a series of laps to dial in the combination — including some grudge matches for a few dollars — to prep for the big-money shootout.

Kye Kelley drew Colton Sauls and his twin-turbo car for the first round of the shootout on Friday night, and with just 25 minutes between runs, hustled to get JangAlang turned around and back into the lanes — only to have weather conditions force the round over into Saturday. That quick turnaround, however, proved to be the undoing of an otherwise stellar weekend.

In the postponed opener, Kye Kelley powered away from Sauls to turn on the win light, but the parachutes failed to deploy, forcing him to climb hard on the brakes to avoid running long. That action ultimately sent the car into a slide, nosing into the wall before sliding sideways into the sand trap and coming to a rest atop a line of railroad ties. The damage to the carbon-fiber nose, fuel cell, oil pan, and chassis proved too much to overcome and Kelley had to bow out of competition.

“Everything was going great, we were 3-0 in competition in grudge races the first time out on radials. We beat Jimmy Taylor in the BAR Racing car, which is a well known radial car, for a couple thousand bucks. The weekend was going great and we drew Colten Sauls first round. We beat him, which was good. We were down to 15 cars for 100-grand, and we had a good running hot rod,” Kye Kelley says.

“The night before when we were thrashing, we had somebody else pack our chutes and they didn’t have a clue what they were doing and that’s what caused me to wreck,” Key explains. “We still don’t know who it was. Whenever I make a pass I pick my chutes up, roll them in a ball, take the cord and wrap it around the middle of the chutes, and set it on the wing. That’s how they put the chutes in the bag, so they pretty much had them tied in a knot to begin with. We never let anybody else touch the car, but we were in a hurry, and we let somebody else pack them and it was a costly mistake, because one of our favorite cars in our fleet is hurt. But it’s fixable, I’m not dead, so it’s just going to cost us 30 or 40 thousand to fix it. End of the day it’s just a costly mistake. We’ll regroup  and get JangAlang back going, because we like the radials. We had fun, and we made a lot of progress in four passes. Luckily I didn’t get hurt, and so it was the best-case scenario for what happened.”