Here is the press release we distributed to the general media, hence the "drag racing for beginners" style:
Press Information – for immediate release
Driver walks free after Funny Car crashes and burns at Santa Pod
The Main Event
Santa Pod Raceway
Sat.28 May 2022
The crowds held their breath at Santa Pod Raceway on Saturday as a 10,000-horsepower racing car crashed and erupted into flames in front of them. The vehicle, known as a Funny Car, ricocheted off both track walls in a fiery conflagration and ended upside down, shorn of its bodywork. Driver Kevin Chapman climbed unscathed from the wreckage and a thorough examination at the racetrack’s medical centre found no harm done.
Safety standards in drag racing are tightly maintained. The enveloping roll cage in which Chapman was seated and the multi-layered firesuit and crash helmet he wore protected him from the worst of the impact and flames. Video evidence suggests that a loosened body panel may have jammed the vehicle’s fuel injector mechanism and contributed to the crash.
Drag racers compete in pairs over a short, straight course. The racing machines they use can be fearsomely powerful. Funny Cars were developed in America in the late-1960s. Originating from production models, they soon acquired purpose-built racing chassis and lightweight, composite-material bodies. Their altered appearances made them look ‘kinda funny’, and the description stuck. Their supercharged, nitromethane-burning V8 engines can nowadays propel them to 300mph in just four seconds.
Kevin Chapman was competing in round two of Santa Pod’s Funny Car Cup series, having won the opening round at Easter. The Bury St. Edmunds racer had won the series title in 2019. His Ford Mustang-bodied Funny Car carried the colours of Thermoreg International, a thermostatic industrial valve manufacturer.
The race meeting was The Main Event, incorporating the opening round of the FIA/FIM European Drag Racing Championships.
Video link – Santa Pod TV – ‘All the angles’:
