NHRA - National Hot Rod Association

Points leader Doug Gordon’s hopes for a second Top Alcohol Funny Car world championship in three seasons took a hit almost as hard as his shunt with the Brainerd Int’l Raceway guardwall in a losing first-round race at the Lucas Oil NHRA Nationals.

Racing second-place Shane Westerfield in a crucial clash in his bid to put some distance between the two, Gordon’s Beta Motorcycles Camaro drifted out of the groove and made an inexplicable hard left turn across the centerline behind Westerfield, impacting the wall and rolling onto its top before grinding to a halt upside down. Other than a few bruises, Gordon was unhurt and emerged under his own power and has vowed to return as quickly as possible with a spare car that the team owns.

Until the accident, Gordon had been battling Westerfield — the 2017 world champ — tooth and nail in the points standings. Gordon had collected three national event wins and a pair of regional victories while Westerfield had two national event wins and a runner-up (the latter to Gordon in Las Vegas) and three regional wins, so the round was crucial but got off to a bad start for Gordon.

“It took off and carried the front end and was getting out of the groove a little bit at the top of low, but when I shifted in second, it was staying right there,” Gordon recalled. “I was able to go all the way through second [gear]. I had [the steering wheel] turned left, but it wouldn't really turn; it was just kind of staying right where it's going. I shifted into high, and it started moving more towards the wall. I let off the gas and was just kind of coasting for a second there, and I'm like, 'Shoot, I don't see him.' The car was straight, so I just hit the gas just to try to get across the finish line in front of him. I let off at the finish line and shortly after that, all of the sudden, the thing just turned sideways. 

“When it hit the wall, I was kind of discombobulated like, 'Where am I? What stage am I at in what it was doing?’ and once it came down off the wall and was sliding down the track upside down, then I'm like, 'OK, I know where I'm at and know what's going on.’

“I feel pretty good. I got pretty lucky. I just got some bruises on the inside of my legs from beating into the steering box. There's a big dent in the roll cage, so it was a massive hit to the roll cage, but the head pads are a really big savior in these cars. I didn't even have a headache. That’s a testament to the rules and the car that Jonnie [Lindberg] built.”

The crash was Gordon’s second in recent memory, having flipped his MB Cabinets Camaro on a night run in Las Vegas in the fall of 2019, but the two accidents were hardly the same.

“The Vegas deal, I know what happened, and felt like I had learned from the mistakes,” he said. “I had the [steering] wheel cranked, and I was trying to keep it off the wall, and then I let off the gas and set the front end down and the wheels dug in and made a hard turn. 

“We're still trying to figure out why it did what it did in Brainerd. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It was out of the groove — and it's not where he's supposed to be, and you're pushing the limits to some extent — but I just feel like this one was out of the blue. In Vegas, that one was more of a dumb-idiot mistake; just being too aggressive. I was being aggressive to some extent here trying to stay in the race, but I don't think it was a dumb-idiot mistake. 

“I've had lots of people look at [the video], helping me analyze it and give me information and opinions. The only thing we can think of is that we've worked on it over the years trying to make our car super aerodynamic, and I think that these Alcohol Funny Cars with the Camaro bodies naturally have very little downforce on the back of them, and we've made ours probably the least amount of downforce of any car out there.

“It wasn't spinning the tires until I hit the throttle the last time, then it did spin the tires when I pedaled it, but on the [data recorder] graph, it looks like the tires came back down and started grabbing the track. I think we just need more downforce. We might have to give up a mile an hour or something to get some more downforce on it. 

"We're talking with a bunch of people that hopefully are a lot smarter than us that can give us ideas of what needs to be done to make it right and still be able to go fast, which I think we will have when we come back.”

The good news for the Beta Motorcycles team is that they have a spare car, one that Lindberg built when he built the crashed car, and it shouldn’t need a lot of work to get back onto the track. He won’t be back in time to compete at the Dodge Power Brokers NHRA U.S. Nationals, where he also was supposed to represent the West Region in the JEGS Allstars, but an early-fall return seems likely.

“In Dreamworld, maybe Reading [the Pep Boys NHRA Nationals] but probably, realistically, we might it may not be until Dallas [the Texas NHRA FallNationals] or maybe a week earlier in St. Louis," he said.

(Regardless of their return, they won’t compete at the Betway NHRA Carolina Nationals; that same weekend, Gordon’s daughters, Maddie and Macie, will be competing for the final time in the Jr. Drag Racing League before aging out. ‘We’re not going to miss that for anything,” said the proud dad.)

“The chassis is ready, but it needs all of the plumbing and wiring and miscellaneous parts, and the biggest thing is probably going to be whether or not we can get all the parts. We’ve also got to get the wheels certified because it takes a different offset on the wheels on this car. 

“I think the motor’s fine — other than the blower and the injector and some scraped valve covers — and I think that the clutch and transmission and rear end and all that kind of stuff are going to be OK. The chassis and the body are junk but most everything else I think is gonna be OK.

“We have a body on that spare car that’s already painted, but we’ve got to get all the decals and stuff made for it and get it all looking like it's Beta colors before we head back out.”

When the team does return, they hope to jump back into the thick of the battle. Early-season clutch problems had them behind the eight ball before going on a five-race winning streak with back-to-back victories at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway (the NHRA Four-Wide Nationals and the West Region event the following weekend) followed by wins at the NHRA SpringNationals, the Central Region event at Texas Motorplex, and then the Summit Racing Equipment NHRA Nationals in Norwalk.

“When we won five races in a row, it was like, ‘Oh man, we're doing great,’ but Shane was doing the same thing. It's like, ‘Man, you're killing me.’ Then we made some changes, working with some different pistons and stuff. We won in Norwalk but really didn't perform as well as we thought, then we go to Seattle, and it performed terribly again, and we lost first round. We made more changes to it and we go to Topeka — once again making no power — and lose in the first round there, too. So then finally got that figured out, but now, we're four races behind as far as the thought process. 

“I think we're going to have our power back, and hopefully, the new car works like the other one. If it does, and we're gonna give it a go, but we have to win three or four out of the five or six races we go to for us to have a shot. It’s doable, but it will definitely be a big feat.”