Clay Millican Does a Full Backflip in His Dragster! Crosses Finish Line On The Roof!

Speed Society’s own Clay Millican is currently sitting #2 in the NHRA top fuel points chase and is having arguably his best season ever with drag racing’s premier sanction. But before stepping into the shark-infested waters of the NHRA, Clay was the big fish in a somewhat smaller, slightly less-treacherous pond.

During a span of six years, Millican was basically unstoppable, winning the world championship an unprecedented six times in a row and winning and otherworldly 68% of the races during his run. He had a 2 year span where he won 21 of 24 events, and held both ends of the IHRA top fuel world record.

During that span, Clay ran several special edition bodies, one of which featured a Dukes of Hazzard livery that was ran in conjunction with the Dukes of Hazzard movie release. The film came on board with IHRA to sponsor an event to help promote the debut, and also had Millican wear the General Lee’s colors.

While Clay admits it wasn’t intentional, this blowover crash certainly brought the General Lee to life in the most Duke Boys way possible. Racing longtime rival and friend Bruce Litton, Clay said he could see that he was still out front when the nose started lifting into the air near half track. Knowing the race was still very much his to lose, Millican decided to “just drive it”, hoping the nose would just hang there and eventually come back down.

As we all know, when you have several thousand horsepower hooked up and pushing the car rapidly toward the finishing at around 250 MPH, things happen in the blink of an eye. The nose came up just enough to allow wind inside the one-piece carbon fiber body and that was all it took to flip the car onto it’s lid.

As Millican points out, the car was surprisingly undamaged in the incident, needing little more than a rear wing, body and I’m assuming a new injector and blower since it skidding on top of the engine instead of the roll cage.

There’s a good chance Clay needed a new firesuit as well, but the car was in good enough shape to run at the next race, showing just how well built these cars really are!