I worked with the Coarse Crew when the Steel Cities Region road raced at an
airport outside Connellsville Pa. One session, we had a TR-4 go off drivers
left and start bounding along in the grass. The violent fore/aft on the
engine pulled a fuel fitting out of the intake manifold letting the fuel
line to squirt all over the nice hot exhaust manifold. A cheery fire
resulted. The corner put two or three fire bottles on it, but it started
right back up. We sent a fire truck out and they foamed the daylights out of
it.
When we got there to tow it away, it looked like it was under the remains fo
the marshmallow man from Ghost Busters. The driver was fine, but the laces
on his driving shoes had melted. He had to cut the remains out of the shoe
to get them off.
I did see a Ford Cobra start on fire at an autocross once. The owner was
fiddling with the fuel filter connection while the motor was hot, and the
drips lit up. When the shop rag he had didn't work, we hit it with a dry
chem and put it out right now. He bitched for months over how long it took
to clean up the engine bay. My response to him was" The Cobra is worth how
much? And you are bitching about investing some elbow grease?"
Larry Steckel
">From: "John Gross" <jogross3@hotmail.com>
>Reply-To: "John Gross" <jogross3@hotmail.com>
>To: oblique@alum.mit.edu, bswilliams@myriad.net
>CC: autox@autox.team.net
>Subject: Re: Have you seen a fire?
>Date: Sat, 17 Jun 2000 19:27:21 PDT
>
> >Actually, this was nothing. It was all calm and controlled and the
> >car had pulled off the track. I've had plenty more exciting things
> >happen to me while flagging. I could talk all day about it!
> >
> >You should try road racing flagging, it is quite a lot of fun.
>
>I can vouch that a lot goes on in those cases. Last weekend, I flagged a
>PCA DE in College Station, and was at a corner where a C5 grenaded a motor
>big time (fortunately, no fire, but the biggest piece we picked up off the
>track was the center part of a rod cap...not much left of that one), and a
>Porsche Boxster went tail-end first into an Armco railing. About two weeks
>before, when working an SCCA race at the same track, a Mustang went
>tail-end
>first into a tire wall at about 65-70 mph and kept going, and a SRF went
>flying through a turn and went airborne over the banking into the mud.
>That's just the recent stuff that I was an eyewitness to. There was much
>more interesting stuff that I heard over the radio (like 2 SRX-7's hitting
>nose to nose)
>________________________________________________________________________
>
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