“I definitely had some altitude,” Casey Friedrichsen, of Arthur, Iowa, conceded. “I’ve flipped in a sprint car before, but not like this. And the sprint car had a wing to absorb the crunch when landing.”
The high-flying action occurred last Thursday during the midget feature at Worthington Speedway. The button that launched the flight toward outer space? A broken oil line on the car in front of his.
“I swerved, and my car jumped his right rear,” Friedrichsen said. “I knew I was about to go on a good ride.”
“It was quiet for the longest time as I saw the track getting farther away. After what seemed like forever, my car hit the ground nose first. The left front dug in, abruptly.”
Fortunately, the crash landing did not injury Friedrichsen.
“My MPI steering wheel bent upon impact, absorbing the energy and saving my hands,” Friedrichsen said. “I was sore the next day, but back at work in the soybean fields at dawn on Friday morning.”
Friedrichsen sat in an Ultra Shield full-containment seat with an Ultra Shield five-point harness. He wore a Bell helmet paired with a Simpson Hybrid head-and-neck restraint.
While Casey Friedrichsen walked away unharmed, he can’t say the same for his midget from Spike Chassis.
“The midget will need a new frame after being stuck into the ground like that,” Friedrichsen said. “The rear end will live another day. But the front end and motor plate won’t. We only broke one shock. We salvaged the engine and a lot of parts. We’ll still be back in midget racing before long.”
Friedrichsen had stepped away from sprint cars to raise his children. But the allure of the Chili Bowl Nationals brought him back to racing.
“I sold off all my sprint car stuff a few years back,” Friedrichsen said. “Then 2 years ago the Chili Bowl got my attention. Driving a midget with its great power-to-weight ratio has always been a bucket list item for me.”
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.
