NHRA Pro Stock racer Alan Prusiensky went for the wildest ride of his professional driving career on Friday at the NTK NHRA Carolina Nationals in Charlotte, North Carolina. The 46-year-old native of Rockaway, New Jersey was making his second qualifying attempt on the zMax Dragway 1/4-mile and had just completed a run of 6.73-seconds at 204.45 mMPH (well short of his earlier 6.626) when the parachutes failed to deploy on his 2018 Dodge Dart. Still carrying a head of steam through the shutdown area, Prusiensky went for the brakes, which sent the car careening across the centerline in front of opponent Chris McGaha and hard into the guardrail.

Prusiensky impacted the guardrail nearly head-on on his roof as the fuel cell erupted into a glowing fireball, before turning back onto all fours and rolling to a stop. Prusiensky was uninjured but was transported to a nearby medical facility for routine evaluation. He later returned to zMax and was interviewed by NHRA’s Joe Castello, commenting, “it was just a failure of a couple of things…maybe the chutes didn’t come out and maybe I panicked a little bit and hit the brakes a little too hard. With these things you can be like that in two seconds. It’s one of them things.”

Prusiensky later commented via social media: “Thank you to everyone that’s reached out to see if I’m doing okay after last night’s bad wreck. Doin’ okay, pretty banged up, but we live to race another day.”