Call it friendly ribbing, if you will, but drag racers are routinely given a hard time by their circle track and road racing counterparts for only going straight — never turning left or right. For the most part, that’s entirely true, but in a handful of locales, turning is a requirement. Here in the states, the Holly Springs Motorsports in Mississippi, which literally has a cul-de-sac in the shutdown area, comes to mind. So too does the Bristol Dragway in Tennessee, which at one time had an uphill shutdown area with a distinct curve to it.

Well, the Brazilian municipality of Maringa has the Race Park Maringa, and the combination of an incredibly short shutdown and a sharp right bend has made it one of the more treacherous drag strips in the world — which is evident by the accidents you’re about to see.

From above, you can see the layout of the Maringa drag strip, which is an eighth of a mile long. While the shutdown area appears as a nice, long, gradual turn…if you take a closer look, you’ll notice that the shutdown area is actually of equal length to the acceleration half of the strip…or perhaps even less. Meaning not only do racers have to be hard on the binders just to get stopped before running out of real estate, but they have to do it without sliding into the wall or rolling the car over when they follow the curve. This is a chore more suited to road racers and their trail-braking skills, but it’s one that drag racers in Brazil are tasked with if they want to race at Maringa.

In the first incident shown below, the car clicks off a pass of right around 6.00-seconds — making it roughly a low nine-second car — and the driver quickly gets the parachutes out, but the combination of hard braking and the necessity of turning right eats him up, sending the car sliding out of control, into the wall nose-first, and over onto its roof.

The second crash appears much worse than the first. The modified Volkswagen Bug clicks off a high six-second pass, but without a parachute onboard, is solely reliant on the brakes to get it reigned in. But just like the in the video seen above, he climbs all over the brakes when the shutdown area goes from nice and straight to hard right. The actions of the driver send the car  into an immediate right turn, and although we can’t see from the vantage point of the camera what he strikes, the Bug can be seen completely airborne, flipping violently in the air and shedding parts in ever direction.

As best we can surmise, both drivers were okay in their respective crashes. We’re guessing these weren’t the first accidents at Race Park Maringa due to the rather unique shutdown area, and they likely won’t be the last…unless someone takes a bulldozer to the place and makes it looks less like LeMans and more like a drag strip.