After rolling over a car last year, Mylee JoAnn learned her lesson. As the result, when she rolled her car last Friday at Deuce of Clubs Thunder Raceway in Show Low, Arizona, she emerged unhurt. That was not the case last season.
In 2023, at Fairgrounds Speedway in Cortez, Colorado, she incurred a concussion after a rollover.
“My dad tightened my belts so tightly that I could not breathe comfortably while driving,” JoAnn, of Farmington, New Mexico, said. “So, I loosened the belts. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have touched the belts. They were so loose, my head hit the roof of the car when I rolled over. My head hit so hard, my helmet cracked.”
Since then, JoAnn has heeded the advice from her father, Curtis Rhanes, when it comes to safety. That paid off last weekend.
“I tightened my belts real tight this time — like my father wanted — it was a blessing,” said JoAnn. “I walked away from the crash, sat on the back of a push truck, and saw that my baby was sitting there upside-down, the front and rear clip severely damaged.”
Her safety equipment consisted of a Velocity helmet paired with a HANS device. She sat in Kirkey full-containment seat, with a Simpson five-point harness.
“We just got it working right — it was all dialed in,” JoAnn said of her hobby stock. “I got locked into another car, and I couldn’t turn the wheel. I drove into the wall, rolled over, and then my car was hit in the rear by another car, spinning my car around. It was pretty scary — everything seemed to happen in slow motion.”
MyLee JoAnn, the 2022 IMCA national sport compact rookie of the year, hopes to get her hobby stock back on track soon. Dennis “Grumpy” Spencer, who built the car, has begun the work to repair it. They aim to get the car back on a dirt oval this weekend at Desert Thunder Raceway in Price, Utah.
“I’m praying that we can redial everything back in,” said JoAnn. “My dad and I have all our numbers written down, so hopefully we’ll be just as fast when the car is fixed.”
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.
