From the looks of this scene, you might think the odds for Jason Manley to finish the feature would be next to nil. Instead, he went on to place second. The action occurred on the third lap of the limited late model feature at I-75 Raceway outside of Sweetwater, Tennessee.
“The 22 car of Karl Tipton and the 116 car of Jake Whitehead made contact right in front of me,” Manley, of Loudon, Tennessee, said. “Contact caused Karl to spin, and then I hit his car and it flipped over.
“It was shocking the way the cars looked, mine on top of Karl’s. It looked like a catastrophic crash.”
Manley was unhurt. He sat in a ButlerBuilt full-containment seat, with a Simpson five-point harness. Manley also wore a Simpson carbon-fiber helmet while racing the car built by CVR Race Cars.
The track crew permitted Manley’s race team to help him out of the car.
“The first thing I did when I got out of the car was check on Karl,” said Manley. “When I found out that he was okay, I began worrying about my car. These cars are expensive. I know it took a long time — about 40 minutes — to get the cars apart, but I appreciate how the track crew took their time.”
After the track crew separated the cars, Manley quickly inspected his ride.
“There were no flat tires,” Manley said. “There was no sheet metal in danger of rubbing on a tire. Because I wasn’t part of the crash, I restarted second. My car actually felt the same as it had before the wreck.”
The former I-75 Raceway track champion finished the feature in second. Jason Manley said it was the first time in 18 years of racing his car lifted off the ground. He recognized the importance of this occurrence.
“It didn’t feel like I was in a wreck,” said Manley. “I told my crew guys to take a lot of photos. Something like this rarely happens in a driver’s career.”
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.
