Turbo Mustang Almost Backflips at Piedmont Dragway!!

Holy smokes!!! This is a spectacular wheelstand and an even better save! Hans at Free Life Films made the trek up to Piedmont Dragway for their second annual Resurrection small tire shootout event. These shootouts are quickly becoming one of the main attractions in the drag racing world, especially at smaller tracks that don’t always have the pull to bring in big names.

The concept is simple. The track or promoter lays out the rules, which are usually kept as simple as possible, and all the cars fitting the rules buy in. Since the clocks are off, matchups are created by drawing from a hat. The cars will then pair up and decide lane choice and get to work knocking each other out through eliminations. As the racing progresses, the process repeats until there are two cars left standing. Those two duke it out to decide the winner, all without a single elapsed time being shown for the whole event.

This causes the cars and trucks in the field to have to focus on running the best pass possible because nobody knows what the guy in the other lane is capable of, and that’s when guys start pushing cars to – and beyond – their limits and we get videos like this.

The silver turbocharged mustang in the far lane is ready to do battle with the nitrous injected S10 closes to the camera. The cars both stage up, and the Mustang actually jumps the tree but stays in the throttle anyway. About the time the boost comes in, the nose heads skyward and before the driver can get his foot off the throttle, all four wheels are off the ground. As we all know, when a car cuts power with the nose in the air, for whatever reason, there’s nowhere to go but down, and that’s exactly where this car heads, at a high rate of speed.

While the wheels are off the ground, the car twists a bit, so it comes down slightly off center, but the driver does an excellent job of wrangling the car up and keeping it in his lane and off the wall. He also does the right thing after it slams back to earth and pulled off of the track, so that if he’s leaking any fluids, they aren’t spilled all over the racing surface. This certainly could have gone much worse, so we have to say we’re glad to see this end with both cars upright and the driver perfectly fine.