Love said he carefully crafted his words to explain what he witnessed.
As he remembered, Jackson drifted out of the groove in the Pontiac GTO and by the time he began to correct, the car made an abrupt turn into the wall, striking at what he estimates was a 2 o’clock position. The collision caused the throttle to hang up. The stuck throttle and a broken a-arm sent the car traveling down the race track, bouncing on and off the wall all the whole way down.
Jackson was traveling quickly enough at the impact that his car still ran 4.15 seconds across the eighth-mile finish line.
Video of the accident shows the damaged car came to a stop shy of parked medical personnel. Then the engine idled down and the car slowed to a stop. Inexplicably, the engine throttled back up, the car spun the tires and took off again. The car came to a stop in the woods to the right of the final turn-off.
Love only shares these heart-wrenching details because he’s fully convinced his driver was incapacitated following the initial hit of the guardwall.
“We have to know what happened here,” Love said. “Bert was a good enough driver, that if he hung the throttle, he would have pushed in the clutch. He would have thrown the parachutes. When that didn’t happen, I knew he wasn’t in control.”
According to safety personnel on the scene, Jackson’s parachutes didn’t deploy until they were ripped from the the car as it went into the woods.