There’s always a first time. Corey Jones found that out during a heat race for the United States Modified Touring Series (USMTS) on night one of the 21st annual Masters weekend at Cedar Lake Speedway in New Richmond, Wisconsin. Prior to that, the driver never experienced a rollover in seven seasons of racing.
“I got into the wall between turn three and four and just kept on racing,” said Jones, 26, of Zimmerman, Minnesota. “I went down the straightaway full throttle, but when I tried to turn for the corner, it didn’t happen. The next thing I knew I was riding the wall and rolled over. The crash happened so quickly that I could not process what caused it.”
With smoke billowing from the engine, Jones impatiently hung in there as the track crew tried to quickly roll his car back on all fours.
“It seemed like a long time upside-down, maybe three to five scary minutes, as the track crew tried to quickly roll the car over,” Jones said. “I was able to get out of the car without injury. I’ve had hard hits before, but nothing like this.”
Jones’s safety equipment consisted of a Bell Racing USA carbon-fiber helmet, HANS device, Kirkey full-containment seat and a five-point harness. Remarkably, his MB Customs chassis showed no signs of damage, and Jones continued racing the car throughout the remainder of the Masters event.
“There was a lot of body damage, but we got the car back together,” said Jones. “We struggled, and we were not able to qualify.”
This upcoming weekend Jones is hopeful that things will go better than what he had experienced the week before.
“We think the rear end housing may be bent,” Jones said. “As for the cause of the accident, we couldn’t say for sure, but it looked like a right-front suspension part failed.”
Mike Adaskaveg has written hundreds of stories since the website’s inception. This year marks his 54th year of covering auto racing. Adaskaveg got his start working for track photographer Lloyd Burnham at Connecticut’s Stafford Motor Speedway in 1970. Since then, he’s been a columnist, writer, and photographer, in racing and in mainstream media, for several outlets, including the Journal Inquirer, Boston Herald, Stock Car Racing, and Speedway Illustrated. Among Adaskaveg’s many awards are the 1992 Eastern Motorsport Press Association (EMPA) Ace Lane Photographer of the Year and the 2019 National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) George Cunningham Writer of the Year.
