I just wanted to express my opinion as the father of a driver on the safety of these Pro Extreme cars. We’ve got a very safe car built by a very good builder, Larry Larson, but it concerns me that everybody is trying to go faster and faster and sacrificing the safety of these cars by taking bars out.

There are bars in that car that people were questioning when he first built it, they were asking, “Larry, why’s that there, do you really need that bar?” and finally his answer got to be, “I know this boy’s mother,” and that was the reason he built our car this way. And there are a lot of good chassis builders out there, a lot of safe builders, but I can’t help being concerned.

What happened to us, it was the first round of testing, we were lined up with Thomas Myers, and Travis left the line, the car shook, it was under power, he pedaled it and when he stuck it in second gear the sparks just started to fly.

Well, we come to find out that when he stuck it in second gear the U-joint broke, it took the flange off and the shaft started to fly around in the driveshaft loop, and it bent over and slapped back like a piece of wire that broke off, the back foot or so of it. So it hit the wishbone and two or three places back there and then turned and came up through the carbon fiber right in the middle of the car and the U-joint part of it struck the Funny Car part of the roll cage. I’ve got the pieces and it mashed it almost flat.

At the end of it the tail flipped up and took the communications cable off his helmet and broke the gear shift off inside the cab with Travis, so we were very fortunate nothing happened to him.

Dan, our crew chief, was on the radio telling Travis he’s got sparks coming out of the car and Travis was trying to call him back saying something happened, but he wasn’t sure what it was and he was just freewheeling. By the time we got down to him, he was already out of the car and had a piece of driveshaft in his hand.

When that driveshaft broke—and understand we’ve got the best equipment on the market—we’ve got that 11-and-a-half-inch rearend, that big rearend, and it’s got a 40-spline flange on it. Well, to put the bigger driveshaft and bigger U-joints in it, we had to redesign the flange because nobody was building one. Well, we come to find out Mark Williams had designed one and started building it two weeks ago, so we’re going to that now.

The other thing is, we have a great builder in Larry Larson and there are a lot of great car builders in this country. Those guys are so diligent about what they do and they’ll build these cars the way they know they have to be built because we’re getting more and more horsepower out of them every day. When I called Larry he was at a race in Topeka and the very first words out of his mouth were, “Is Travis okay?”

We were very fortunate, but I’m going to go ahead and Larry has already started designing and ordered a piece of titanium that will come from the bottom of that roll cage and will cover the back of it all the way up. Because if we lost a tire and it started to shred and started slapping up against that wheel tub, it’s just carbon fiber, and then there’s bars and his back and a tire at a hundred and fifty miles an hour could kill the kid and there’s nothing he could do, he couldn’t get away from it. So, for a few more pounds, I’m going to put the titanium shield in there and I expect there will be other people doing it, too.

I talked to Quain (Stott) yesterday and he said he’s got an insert in his legal car, but not in his outlaw car, and he said, “We always read about another driver that got killed or hurt badly and then we make a change for safety.” Then he said, “I don’t want to be and I don’t want Travis to be that statistic that tells us to put the titanium insert in these cars.”

Larry is fixing our car now, he’s been working round the clock on it and we’ll be in Martin where we’ll have a safe race, but as soon as it gets back the titanium insert is going in. It’s just something we have to do. As a father I’m just not going to put the kid in something that I can see how he’d get hurt.

It’s these things like what happened to us in Tulsa that are eye-opening experiences. You look at these pictures and you can’t help but say, “Wow, how did that get through there without hitting him in the arm, without hitting him in the back?” We are very, very fortunate. It’s like my wife Barb said when we left the track that day, we very easily could’ve been going to a hospital.

It’s just concerning to me to think we’re trying to make these cars lighter and lighter and sacrificing a bar here and a bar there just because we don’t have to have it. Well, we don’t have to have it until something like this happens.

Ck and replace your Ujoints often.Use solid spicer 1350 joints,Not the cheap  ones.
Replace your u-bolts too.