Sunday at the 2024 NHRA Finals in Pomona, Ca., was supposed to be another day at the drag races… until it wasn’t.
Ron Capps was following the same routine he’d practiced many times. The car pulled out to go to the staging lanes while the NAPA Auto Parts-sponsored driver returned to his lounge to prepare for the last race of the 2024 season. It was the time he spent alone with no one around in preparation. He dressed in silence and walked out to join the team in the staging lanes. He realized he’d forgotten his phone no sooner than he’d walked out of the hauler.
Top Fuel had already begun running the first round, so he had little time to fool with retrieving his phone.
Capps grabbed the phone and looked down to notice he’d missed a lot of calls. It was a double-digit amount. It was odd to him to have that many missed calls and even more odd that several of them were from close friend Bill Windham, who knows not to call before a round of competition.
“I thought, ‘That’s weird,” Capps recalled.
Capps began to call Windham as crew chief Dean “Guido” Antonelli came running up.
“First of all, your mom’s okay,” Antonelli said. “Everybody’s all right, but there’s been a plane crash down there.”
Capps hung up the phone as his heart dropped.
Racing had just stopped as NHRA PA announcer Alan Reinhart proclaimed, “Just when you think you’ve seen it all, we’ve had a plane crash.”
Capps was already on a golf cart with his team headed to the site.
“I got down there, and there was fuel all over the place,” Capps recalled.
“They had taken the one girl out of the plane. As I got there, I was still in my fire suit. The race had stopped. Everybody in the grandstands was looking backward. I looked up, and there were all of our fans looking down. my son had run into our motorhome right through the Fuel to get our dog out. And then I was running to a friend of ours who had their dog, their big dog, in their truck, which happened to be parked right where the truck that got hit by the airplane took all the speed off before it hit the RV.”
As ugly as the scene was, Capps knew something miraculous had transpired. It had. The three passengers in the plane had somehow miraculously survived with non-life-threatening injuries, and no one on the ground had even a scratch.
“Thank God Top Fuel had started because they all went up to the fence,” Capps added. “Otherwise, we would’ve had friends and family all right there in that same exact spot.”
It’s what Capps didn’t know, which was who might be injured or killed, that wore on him ferociously.
“Once they brought my mom over, and I saw she was all right because she was just right there a minute before that, then we were able to breathe easier,” he said. “My son had just run through the pool of gasoline to save the dog.”
Somehow or another, Capps had to return to his pits and focus on the first round of eliminations.
“I don’t know how I was able to refocus, and thank God we won that round,” Capps said. “A lot was going on. We couldn’t get the motorhomes out of there. The investigators came in, so we were locked out, and all of our stuff was in there.”
Between rounds, Capps returned to ensure everything that could spark a fire was turned off, and it was.
“We’ve been in that campsite for many years and we have planes come over us all the time,” Capps explained. “When you race Pomona, as a racer, you’re used to staging the car and it’s not uncommon. The biggest moments I’ve had in my life are winning the championship of Pomona, and as you’re staging a car with all the pressure in the world on, here comes a little Cessna landing right over the scoreboards. It’s a weird scenario.”
Capps admits he’s always had a measure of “what if” that plans in his mind as the planes so routinely and effortlessly fly over the track and land. That same thing when he’s camped out in this area with his family for as long as he can remember.
“Amanda [Busick] interviewed me after the crash, and I couldn’t talk about it without losing my emotions,” Capps said. “After the first round win, I was better. After the second round, I was able to talk to her without completely breaking down. But just once I knew everybody was all right, I was better off.”
Capps said the picture of Caden running through the gasoline with the family’s dog, Macy, serves as a stark reminder that the dragstrip racing surface isn’t the only place volatile things can happen.
“He’s running out of the motorhome with Macy, our little dog, and somebody grabbed a photo with the plane in the background,” Capps said. “They haven’t even gotten the people out of the plane. The Fuel is everywhere, and he’s in a sprint. It’s pretty wild. This is the kind of stuff that you never would believe would happen to you until it does.”
