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Forrest Bond Remembers........ A Bad Day at the Races
The LaPorte Fire-Up Accident By Forrest Bond What follows is what memory has left me after more than 40 years. Any corrections will be appreciated. Art Malone had entered two cars for the '64 AHRA Nationals at Green Valley, and Val LaPorte got the duty in the second car, which was essentially a back-up for Art, were he to be eliminated in the primary car. LaPorte's fire-up accident happened during eliminations. The way the ladder worked out, he was to race Art, and the working assumption was that he was to take a dive, though trying to dive under the guardrail was not part of the plan.
In those days, with push starts, it wasn't uncommon for people to use a single tube sticking out the back of the race car, and it was fairly easy for an angle to develop between the race car and the push car. Leaning on the push-bar at an angle could set up an oscillation, a whiplash, if you will, and if the push car driver didn't brake quickly enough, or the driver didn't make the right steering correction, the whole think could get well out of hand. The process was not unlike what leads to a jackknife with a tractor-trailer rig.
As LaPorte was being pushed down the return road to fire up, he was approaching me from behind. I was, as I remember, standing on a guard rail post, and framing the shot I expected to take of the race. I heard something -- don't remember what -- but whatever it was, I sensed that something wasn't going according to plan. I turned to look over my shoulder and saw LaPorte coming fast -- maybe 50 mph -- and on a trajectory that didn't include the rest of the return/fire-up road, but did include the back of the guard rail not far past me. I looked down into the cockpit as he went past, and he was sawing at the wheel, but dragsters then as now were meant to go straight, not corner, and it obviously wasn't going to work out.
It was a pretty good hit, as the photos of the damage to the car suggest, and as can be judged by the fact that it broke a pretty thick pole from which some of the PA wires were strung. You can see the base of the pole on the return-road side of the guardrail, and the upper part of the pole, still held vertical by the wires, on the track side. There wasn't time for me to react before the car hit the posts backing up the guard rail, so just watched the inevitable contact. The impact vibrated down the guardrail and dislodged me from my perch on one of the posts, onto the track. In the color photo, I'm the guy in the orange Drag News shirt that can be seen taking photos of the aftermath. The other photographer, in the white t-shirt, is my old friend, Tim Marshall.
Ultimately, it was just a racing incident, the kind of thing that could happen to pretty much anyone. Whether LaPorte or the push-car driver was (more) at fault is something I couldn't judge, as the whole thing started behind me. After the car lodged itself in the fence posts, LaPorte was helped out of the car, by driver Marvin Schwartz and others, and appeared pretty dazed. He had taken a pretty good lick. Thanks largely to the shallow angle into the guardrail, only his pride was injured, which wasn't helped by Malone's reaction after he finished what had become a bye run and got back to the pits. The car was a brand new Garlits chassis, and, I gathered, meant to be a replacement for the one he was using as a primary that five-day weekend. In looking at the car before it was hauled off, I was struck by the amount of damage done to the chassis, given that it had been a fairly low-speed impact. At that point, I hadn't seen a dragster that had hit anything at really high speed, but looking at the twisted tubing I suddenly had a pretty good idea why the cars weren't really survivable in a high-speed impact, and a lot more respect for they guys who drove them.
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