Shawn “Murder Nova” Ellington’s father, Richard Ellington, went for a terrifying ride during the Hinton (Oklahoma) Street Drags last weekend, when he lost control of the family’s prized 1955 Chevrolet and struck the guardrail nearly head-on at 98 mph.

The ’55, one of Shawn’s earlier rides that he raced in 10.5-inch tire contests with its big-block nitrous setup and hauled his then-infant son Aiden around in, had been parked for more than a decade; Shawn and the crew at 187 Customs recently gave the machine a little makeover and built a fresh ProCharger-boosted LS engine package for the dual-purpose street/strip machine. The project was completed this spring and Shawn himself had only made a couple of licks on the street behind the wheel before handing the keys to his father for the Hinton drags.

Photo: Shawn Ellington

They bolted Mickey Thompson 275/60/15 radials on the car to partake in the 30-mile cruise that was part of the races at Hinton, and Shawn says that inexperience on his father’s part on the radial — combined with perhaps just a bit too much power — may have been their downfall.

The engine package produces an estimated 900 horsepower to the wheels — Shawn believes it’s capable of going 4-seconds to the 1/8-mile — and with a little extra timing dialed-in at Hinton, it proved too much on the radial on a very tricky surface.

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“He’s fine…as soon as he heals up a little bit more, then I might kill him,” Shawn says of his father, who, fittingly, has spent his working life doing auto-body work. “But the car didn’t kill him. He got lucky. To be honest, we had no idea the car was going to be that fast. There’s certain things you should probably tell somebody before you put them in a radial car on an iffy surface — if it spins, it’s over. Lift. We didn’t even talk about that…I literally thought it was just going to go right down through there…it wasn’t very fast, the car was still turned way down. And he just built up a lot of wheel speed, and at that point, there’s nothing that you can do.”

“It is what it is…it’s a car at the end of the day, and that sucks, because it’s clear it’s not just a car, because otherwise I wouldn’t feel so bad. It can be fixed, and that’s what we’re going to do,” Shawn adds, noting he definitely shed a tear or two seeing his beautiful machine wadded up.

“There’s a little bit of bittersweet to it, because it was fast,” he continues. “He left on a footbrake, and jumped out about three, maybe four car-lengths on that 1,000 horsepower GT-R, and it was rolling. As soon as it left the line, I was ‘oh shit,’ and then after that I said, ‘oh shit.’ It was in slow motion the whole time.”

Not to be deterred, Shawn, Richard, and company are already formulating a plan of attack to rebuild the car as good, if not better, than it was before the incident. They’ll begin by cutting the front clip off, have the chassis checked to ensure it’s true, and then addressing the folded-up and scraped-up body panels one by one.

“I appreciate everybody sending out all the links to other ’55 Chevy’s and stuff, but another ’55 Chevy isn’t my unicorn, this is my unicorn. We’ve been through a lot with this car, and we’ll definitely go through a lot more,” Shawn says.