When the right-front tire blew, it sent the sport compact of Connor Schwien for a series of rollovers. It occurred as he was competing for the lead with Gage Porter on the final lap of the feature at Rolling Plains Motor Speedway in Hays, Kansas.
“Gage and I battled to the end — we ran hard side by side, but never touched each other’s cars,” Schwien, of Russell, Kansas, said. “I ran in the last turns too hard. In the middle of turn three and four, my right-front tire blew and pulled me off the top of the track. The rim dug in real hard, and I started rolling.”
The crash destroyed the Chevrolet Cobalt he had bought from another racer. As the top of the roll cage hit the track surface, the impact bent the cage three inches toward Schiwen’s head.
“I was not injured, surprisingly,” said Schwien. “I was sore the next morning, though.”
Schwien sat in an old-school aluminum racing seat, with a new five-point harness from Crow Safety Gear. He wore a G-Force Racing Gear helmet paired with a HANS device. Schwien will make an upgrade to his safety equipment for his next car.
“We purchased a new Kirkey full-containment seat,” Schwien said. “After experiencing what I just went through, that was a must.”
The crash rattled his older brother, Jakob, who was racing in the same feature as Schwien and witnessed the crash from right behind him.
“He told me he was freaking out,” said Schwien. “I got out of the car in 15 seconds. When he saw that I was okay, he was relieved.”
The Schwien brothers and their father, Toby, all race sport compacts. Connor Schwien is looking forward to rejoining them this week with a new car.
“We have another stock 2008 Cobalt,” Schwien said. “We have a spare sport compact with a professionally built cage. We’ll take the cage out of the spare car, put it into the new Cobalt, and transfer the engine to the new car from the wrecked car.”
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.
