Former Mountain Motor Pro Stock racer and current PDRA Pro Boost competitor Jerry Yeoman lit up the starry Oklahoma sky on Friday evening at the inaugural PDRA Under The Lights held at the Osage Casino Tulsa Raceway Park, when what may have likely been a chain reaction of events led to one of the most spectacular explosions we’ve seen in quite some time.
During the second round of Pro Boost qualifying, Yeoman’s turbocharged 1959 Corvette erupted into a fireball in a strange and certainly frightening scene just prior to taking the tree. As could be heard in the video filmed by the crew at Urban Hillbilly, Yeoman’s Corvette was sky-high in RPM as he built boost before bumping into the stage beams, suggesting a fault with the two-step device in the race car. As Yeoman went to light the second bulb, smoke could seen be seen emerging from inside and underneath the car, and a millisecond later, it lurched forward into a massive fireball.
With flames and smoke still evident inside the cockpit after the initial explosion, the mostly-blinded Yeoman slowly rolled to a stop, bumping the nose of the car up against the guardrail. The PDRA safety staff was on the scene immediately and stomped out the fire. Yeoman was reportedly uninjured in the blast, but was transferred to a nearby medical facility to be checked out.