People who participate in drag racing understand the risk that every time you belt in and put the car in the beams something bad could happen. The majority of the time everything goes according to plan and if you’re lucky the win light even comes on for you. Its when things go wrong that the ugly risk can show up and ruin a race day. During testing at the Summit Motorsports Park in Norwalk, Oh. this past weekend, Mark Carlyle and his record setting Atomic Fusion Z06 Corvette had one of those bad days at the office.

Carlyle and his IPS Motorsports Corvette can usually be found at the top of the Drag Radial class in the LSX Challenge series, and last year he was locked in an epic season long battle with Sal Patel and his twin turbo Viper for the hoor of the quickest IRS-equipped car in the world. Both racers took turns swapping the record with Sal being the first car in the 6’s. Later, Carlyle smashed the record with a 6.82 at 223 mph pass to close the season. That pass became the new IRS and LSX drag radial record. The car was then torn down and rebuilt for this year, ready to set even more records.

Images courtesy Mark Carlyle

This past Sunday, Carlyle hit a slight roadblock on his quest for LSX racing dominance. While testing in Norwalk, the Atomic Fusion Corvette had a serious fire under the hood. Mark was not hurt in the very scary incident, but the car did not fare as well. According to Carlyle “It appears that the O-Ring on the back injector over #7 failed causing fuel to spill out. When I pulled the chutes that fuel was thrown all over everything and caught fire.”  As you can see from the pictures the car took some pretty heavy damage. 

Carlyle and his team, being the diehard racing junkies that we here at Dragzine love, had the car stripped down and ready to go to PK Race Cars by late Monday. They have a boatload of parts on order and will get this car ready to rock as soon as they can get their hands on it. Make sure to follow the progress over at the Carlyle Racing Facebook page, and don’t be surprised to see the big bad Atomic Fusion Corvette back in the staging lanes ready to set records by the Holley LS Fest later this summer.