Drag Racing Crash at Track Leads to Insurance Fraud!
When you head out to any sort of race track and plan to put your own car to the test, you must know that you are fully responsible for anything that happens out there. No matter what unfolds on the track, whether it is your fault or not, you are going to be the one who is left to pay for the damages to your ride and that’s a responsibility that you assume upon making your way through that gates and on to the racing surface. This is why you might see some people letting the other guy go first at your local track’s test and tune night.
As someone who has personally raced his car that I have had a car payment on, I can say with confidence that most people who do this kind of racing have had the thought cross their mind of what exactly they would do in the unfortunate situation of getting in an accident. It’s not very likely but if you owe money on a car that you just wrecked, it could provide for a pretty unhappy situation no matter what way you slice it.
No-Prep Drag Race – Normally, when drivers make their way to a drag strip to race, there is rubber on the track along with chemicals sprayed down to help with traction. During a no prep, the track is scraped so that drivers will have no traction aid and the result lies more in the hands of he who has the best driving ability. Drivers usually head into these races knowing that there is a heightened chance of a crash situation.
For this Oklahoma City man, it looks like the way that he decided to “slice it” would land him in some hot water. You see, Tim Barnum would make his way to Thunder Valley Raceway in Oklahoma for a no prep race known as “Armageddon” and as luck would have it, he would end up plowing into the wall with his supercharged 2015 Ford Mustang, an ugly sight for sure. At the time, you couldn’t help but feel for Barnum as he would be forced to load up his Mustang’s carcass on a flatbed and head on home.
In a situation like this, the most logical thing to do would be to either try to rehab the car yourself, pull the useful parts out of the car and plop them in another Mustang, or maybe even just sell all of the useful pars and start again from scratch. However, court records show that Barnum had other ideas.
“As court records show, Barnum, a self-proclaimed drag racing enthusiast, claimed that he had a tire blowout on Highway 77 and struck a center barrier. Farmer’s issued a check for $13,697.78, and a credit union was paid $18,722.83 as the lien holder.” -Dragzine.com
As you have probably deduced by the title of this article, that still isn’t where the story stops. Whether Barnum liked it or not, there were tons of cameras on the action here and from what we have tallied up, between popular video channels alone on YouTube, the incident had gained well over a million and a half views not to mention all of the views from those who posted it to other social media platforms. One of those views, the view of an insurance adjuster from Farmers, the company that cut the check for over $30,000 for the car, just so happened to be the one that threw the wrench in the gears, busting open an insurance fraud investigation.
With testimony from the tow truck driver who pulled the Mustang back to the pits saying that the car did, in fact, crash there that night, Barnum would turn himself in to Oklahoma County Jail and bond out.
I guess that this story just goes to show you what you shouldn’t do when drag racing. If you were wrapped up in a crash situation like this, what would your first course of action be?
