Scary situation for Lawrence O’Connor. His modified fell off his lift gate while his crew chief Aaron Hardesty jumped to the ground below, narrowly avoiding the car as it dropped to the ground.
“There are lessons to be learned from the incident,” said O’Connor, who works as an industrial contractor specializing in high rigging. “Like most safety failures, it could have been prevented. When failures occur, redundancy in prevention must kick in.”
O’Connor chronicled the sequence of events that occurred at Coos Bay Speedway during the IMCA Wild West Speedweek.
His crew parked the hauler on a slight incline, meaning the car would head downhill when unloaded.
To fit the modified in the trailer, they let out air from the tires. To reinflate them, Hardesty let the car roll halfway out. After airing them up, he used a stick to push the clutch and roll the car back. While doing so, Hardesty noticed the right-rear tire was going flat. He got an airline, walked around the back of the car and reinflated the tire. As the car began to roll back, Hardesty had put himself in a precarious position being behind the car. He could not make it back to the driver’s side, so he jumped off the liftgate, landing on his feet and then rolling away from the dropping car.
“The car picked up enough speed to roll over the wheel chock, knocking the right-side chock to the ground and causing the left side chock to roll up into the chassis and become pinned behind the four bar for the birdcage,” O’Connor said. “That caused the car to twist before falling, which saved Aaron’s life.”
Fortunately, Aaron suffered just heavy bruises to his feet and the car incurred minor damage. Going forward, O’Connor will use a safety tether, as recommended by Midwest racing star, Jesse Sobbing, to keep the car in place on the liftgate.
“Not everyone realizes the importance of a safety tether because they unload their cars hundreds of times and nothing happens,” O’Connor said. “The next day I went to the hardware store and bought two hooks. I doubled up a 5,000-pound rope I had on hand and made a tether slightly longer to where the car hits the chocks, so the tether could be released when need be. Being in the construction profession, I deal with steel cable. When I get home, I will measure and make a steel tether.”
Lawrence O’Connor deems what happened an accident, but it’s one he’s not just going to chock up to bad luck.
“I am not ashamed to make it public,” O’Connor said. “When things have a potential to go bad, but never have gone bad, you still have to plan for the worst. We almost lost a life. We were extremely fortunately the car fell off at an angle.”
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.
