Believe it or not, Ross White’s night did not end with this heat race crash. Thanks to the help of several others, he rebounded with a B-main win and a 12th-place finish in the feature.
White started out the night on the wrong foot at Thunder Mountain Speedway in Kentucky.
“I got buried in qualifying and was trying to make chicken salad out of chicken shit,” White, of Knoxville, Tennessee, said. “The track was bottom dominant, so I was trying to circle around at the top. I went into turn one hot, my car bottomed out, unloaded the front end and then bounced up the track towards the wall.”
Then White made a split-second decision that may have saved his car from further damage.
“I picked up the gas to catch the wall with the right rear instead of the front end,” White said. “Otherwise, I was going up and over the wall and turning upside down.”
White was prepared. He sat in a Kirkey full-containment seat buckled down by Simpson belts within a Longhorn chassis. White wore a Bell helmet with a Simpson Hybrid head-and-neck restraint system. While White was not injured, fortunately he was also prepared with spare parts. But time was not on his side.
“When I got to the pits, the crew from Caleb Todd and Josh Fulkerson pitched in to help with repairs,” White said. “We had to replace the right-front wheel, J-bar and all of the left-front suspension. The three-piece design of the Keizer wheels helped absorb the impact, and saved me from a lot more damage.”
With all hands on deck, they finished repairs with a half hour. White started the B-main last and worked his way to the front for the win. That put him in 19th to start the feature and he finished 12th in a nonstop feature. The good efforts of Caleb Todd did not hurt his efforts, as he won the race.
“Over the years I learned there are a lot of really good people in racing,” White said. “It’s nights like this that remind me of that. I couldn’t have made it to the feature without the help I got.”
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.
