Stevie Fast Takes Flight AGAIN at MotorCity Mayhem 5!

For the second time in less than a year, Steve “Stevie Fast” Jackson has put a Mustang into low-earth orbit. After breaking the internet last fall when he went flying at Lights Out 8 in his beloved Shadow fox body coupe, Jackson returned to radial racing in the Shadow 2.0 Camaro, the first ever purpose-built tube chassis Radial vs the World car, and he immediately set the record for the class this spring in his return to action following the spectacular crash.

Anybody who knows Stevie, however, knows he will get behind the wheel of anything and push it to the max to turn on the win light, so when hired wheelman Jeffrey Barker stepped out of the Showtime Racing grudge Mustang known as “Big Daddy” to await the arrival of his baby with his wife Lindsay, Jackson jumped into the driver’s seat and took the wheel of the sinister black ‘Stang. They loaded up the car and headed north to Payso Production’s annual grudge/no-time event MotorCity Mayhem in Milan, Michigan. The event draws some huge names from the grudge world to Milan Dragway each year and is always a great show for the fans and racers alike.

One of the featured races this year was Big Daddy versus Armageddon, the equally-wicked nitrous grudge Mustang of Justin “Little Country” Swanstrom. This pair of nitrous-huffing badasses have been building toward a head-to-head meeting for a while now and it was finally time to throw down, only it didn’t end quite as planned. When the green light dropped, Little Country pulled out to a car-length lead and seemed to be holding it. The nose of Stevie’s ride floated just above the track’s surface, and he just might have – and this is purely speculation on my part – grabbed the emergency nitrous kit to try to reel Swanstrom in on the top end. Whether he did or didn’t doesn’t really matter, the nose of the car suddenly shot upward and in the blink of an eye, all four wheels were off the ground and the car was sailing above the track. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to bring a car back to earth, and as you’d expect, the landing was brutal. The car pancaked back to earth and one of the front wheels broke, leaving Stevie without steering. He jumped all over the brakes and got the chutes out, but the car still slid across the track and tagged the wall, although the blow was relatively soft considering how bad it could have been.

I caught up with Stevie a little while later in the staging lanes and asked him how he was following the incident. He flashed that trademark crooked grin and said “Man, I got in the ambulance to get checked out and the girl checked my pulse and goes ‘… this can’t be right. It’s sixty-two?!’ and I said ‘Naw, that’s probably about right.’ I reckon I’m getting a little too good at crashing these things!”

The damage to the car was actually surprisingly minimal considering how spectacular the crash was, needing only a wheel and some cosmetic work to be back up and running, though it seemed they decided to take the car back to the shop and look everything over closely before returning it to the track. We’re glad Stevie is okay, and hopefully he won’t need his pilot’s license again.