Pro Stock veteran Greg Anderson earned Friday night’s Stampede of Speed qualifying bonus - $7,500, sitting in tidy stacks in a fancy briefcase - at the NHRA Texas FallNationals. But he looked at it wistfully, knowing that money had wings on it as soon as he received it.  
 
Fellow driver Eric Latino, Anderson’s ownership partner at KB Titan Racing, had crashed the Gesi Chevy Camaro ahead of him in the second qualifying session at Texas Motorplex. Latino’s car got loose, clipped a cone as it slipped across the center line, veered right smack into the guardwall, erupted into a massive ball of flames and sparks, and flipped onto its roof. The horrifying spectacle interrupted qualifying, delaying the action. With that came better air and track conditions, helping Anderson take the provisional No. 1 qualifying position and ace out nemesis Erica Enders. But it came at a steep cost: Anderson said, “I got this briefcase full of money and most of it's coming out of it to pay for the car.”
 
That they could make jokes, even cheerless ones, is a blessing. Anderson and Latino both knew they can make more briefcases full of money, that the human treasure is what’s irreplaceable. Latino walked away from the ugly mass of melted parts – after crew member Joey Gladstone helped free him from the wreckage. And amazingly, Latino said he experienced no pain or soreness when he awoke Saturday morning and that upon inspection, his car equally miraculously escaped with only minimal damage, relatively speaking.
 
“I woke up this morning not even realizing I was in a crash last night,” Latino said. “I just got up, walked around, I go, wow, I can't believe this. I'm touching my toes, and I come back up and it's like, ‘Wow. I feel great. Actually, I thought the car was a write-off. I looked at it this morning. I'm telling you, all the wheels are dead-straight, control arms are straight struck in the car. It just tweaked the front end and scuffed the body. Need a new body, need the front frame section. But as far as all the suspension components and everything, they're all solid Inside. Cockpit looks pretty good.”
 
After what it went through, that’s remarkable. Latino recounted the experience this way:
 
“It was like the car was slowly going left and I'm trying to bring it back, and the air was good. The car's accelerating hard. It's going to go left. And it just got too far, and I said, ‘Man, you know what? I should have lifted a second ago.’ It happened so quick. You never know. I didn't know this at this racetrack, but I was told that the track has a real narrow lane and you don't have much of a groove here. But to me, it was pretty good until I got the fourth gear, and the fourth gear, I should have just packed it in and I wouldn't admit it.”
 
Competition Plus publisher/editor Bobby Bennett asked Latino, “Hadn’t you heard the reputation of Texas Motorplex for having that narrow groove?”
 
Latino replied, “Well, no, but I heard about It after I crashed the car.”
 
He said, “No, seriously, if I knew it was that bad . . . I was told about Phoenix. So in Phoenix, when that car got out of the groove, I was out. I was out of that car, but I didn't know about this track. I figured Texas Motorplex – I didn't think it'd have that kind of issue. But yeah, I was surprised.”
 
In his defense, Latino said, “I've been up and down a track probably 1500, 2,000 times. So I know when to lift, but there's times where if the groove is real wide, you can just bring the car back around and keep going. I guess what they say . . . it's all concrete. A lot of tracks maybe are concrete up to like 800 feet, then they’ve got asphalt, but all the lime comes out of the concrete and it doesn't really work very well. When you got one tire stuck to the groove and one tire to the concrete automatically driving the car over . . .”

 
He said he wasn’t aware that this dragstrip is notorious for chewing up race cars. “We didn't race there a lot. So when we ran Pro Modified, we didn't come here a lot. We didn't really start coming here until around 2020, 2021. I only came here once in 2020. Then I ran here last year. But nah, we were never told. And again, it's one of those things where maybe I should know after racing it for 35 years, but I raced mostly in Canada. I didn't start racing in the U.S. until like 2013, 2014 for the past 10 years. So I still don't know what tracks are great, which ones are not.”
 
Before tackling the Pro Stock class, Latino competed in Pro Modified – a class notorious for having to wrestle the car, manhandle it all the way down the track. A Pro Stock car requires more finesse than power to drive.
 
Yeah, the Pro Mod’s got probably 400 to 500 pounds of downforce going down the track at half-track. And these cars [have] no downforce because you can't, they got no power, don't have the same power that the Pro Mod has. So they're just not set up the same way. Basically, you got to be in the groove by third and you can fight it by third gear. You're good to get the car back in the middle. If you're not in by the third gear, you got to stop. Honest to God, it was so dark out there. It's like they're still using incandescent light bulb. So I'm going down, I can see the car going left and I'm trying to reign it back, but I still really couldn't see as good if it was an hour earlier with [more] light.” He said he “maybe” could have wrestled a Pro Mod back into the groove, but it’s a moot point.
 
Needled that his car’s roof needs a new paint job, Latino said that roof “was what saved the car. As soon as it hit the wall, the car flipped, put the car on the roof. And it's like having your arm straight up in the air, the wheels and everything are hanging upside down. It's got nothing to hit. We rolled the wheels this morning, they're like, we turned it that straight.”
 
As for his emotions, Latino said, “I'm not embarrassed about it. You know what I always say about racing: It's never ever, ever going to be ‘if.’ It's always ‘when.’ I don't know of one racer in Pro Stock that hasn’t wrecked. Erica [Enders] and Greg Anderson, Jason Line, they've all done it just, things just happen. Right? For me, more disappointed. More disappointed that I'm not racing today. And yeah, it's going to cost, absolutely going to cost money. They're not cheap to fix. But I'm lucky enough that we have a spare car back at the shop right now that I'm going to get ready for Vegas and for Pomona. And we got two new other cars coming in into the shop in about three weeks. So I'll be able to drive something and then get my car fixed.”
 
He said, “Five years ago I would tell you, ‘Man, I'm done.’ But five years later, I own this whole set-up: truck, cars, and everything. In that situation where I can afford it now. So the car got hit. Oh, well, it's a hundred grand of fixing. Going to go raise it again. I know it sounds weird to say that. But I'm not worried about the car. I'm worried that I didn't get hurt and I got a car to come out next week. We have two new cars. One just came from the paint shop. We'll have it next week, and the other one getting painted.
 
“It's a business. It's one of those things where it happens. How we do our deal is the driver pays. So you crash the car, the [driver pays]. I crashed my own car. I own that car, my own car. So I got to pay my own deal,” Latino said, “So it's a lot of money. My wife goes, ‘Now what?’ I go, ‘Well, it is what it is.’”
 
What It Is is the grace of God, the competence of the car builders, and the surety of the safety equipment.