Things don’t always work out the way we hope they do. One measure of maturity is how you react to the unforeseen – do you panic and make things worse, or do you calmly assess the situation and make the best of it? Here, we have examples of two very different ways Corvette drivers handled potentially bad situations while racing.
Recently, Chris Demorro reported that last year’s C5 versus C6 [1] stoplight-racing crash in Texas, a YouTube monument that garnered millions of hits, was finally punished by Texas law this year. In that instance, 45-year-old Roy Bowden and 24-year-old Brian Hebert were indicted on several charges, including a third-degree felony charge due to the fact that Hebert had to be taken to a hospital for related injuries after his mother insisted on it [2]. While that may have kept him from going to jail immediately, as he was allegedly driving on a suspended license, in the long run it made matters worse.
[3]Yikes... that's a lot of window tint!
By contrast, the drag racer in our featured video faces the unexpected and handles it with aplomb – while there are no crashes or explosions to highlight our featured 10.15-second pass, having a hood pop open in the middle of the dragstrip is a sure way to raise your heartbeat into the triple digits.
Sucks? Oh yeah it does! And we often forget that drag racing as a whole is a touch-sensitive sport that only takes one flinch to screw everything up. Needless to say, our go-fast fiend from Avon, Indiana has found out just how “touchy” the racing craft can be, saying “I know the ET wouldn’t have been much better, but my miles per hour might have been in the 131s like the only two runs that I ran out.”