When it comes to the NHRA’s new Factory X class, Geoff Turk has been the first at a few things. He was the first to display a completed race car at the 2022 PRI Show in Indianapolis, and almost four months later, was the first documented of the next level of Factory Stock Showdown cars to hit the track.
The first two out of three aren’t bad. It’s just the third one of the firsts that has Turk kicking himself.
Turk also became the first to crash a Factory X car.
“Very dubious honor,” Turk admitted. “It wasn’t one I was looking for. I would have been happy to let somebody else have that first.”
Turk was testing his new Blackbird Dodge at his home track in Bowling Green, Ky. He had made a thousand-foot run and lifted, and while the run presented some challenges, there was nothing to signal the next one would be an accident.
“Everything went well. I hit my goofy, poorly placed chute button that I didn’t think I should use, but I tried to use it, and while it worked on the first pass, it didn’t go so well for me on the second,” Turk explained. “The brakes worked fine [on the first pass] because it was 180 miles an hour pass; wasn’t anything too crazy going on.”
Turk has been a lifelong manual transmission driver, but on the race track, his race cars had been automatics. One of the mandates for the new Factory X cars would employ manual transmissions.
While Turk was admittedly a novice at racing the clutchless manual, he went through the gearbox like a natural.
“Everything was fantastic, moved around a little bit on each shift, hit the first speed trap, made a move to the left, I counter steered to the right,” Turk recalled. “I reached up about that same time to hit that goofy little chute button.”
Turk said that while counter-steering, his hand went to the wrong position and missed the parachute button. He tried again and missed before the steering wheel demanded his full attention.
“I got it back sorted out and decided before I put the chute down, I was going to go ahead and apply some brake,” Turk said. “I just came into the brakes just a little bit. And these are carbon brakes; everybody warned me about how they’re goofy because they do the opposite of what you think. They don’t have any brake pressure, and then all of a sudden, you got tons of brake. So I just pressed on the brake just a little bit, a little bit, and I was getting up. I pressed a little bit more, and the front end locked up, and I was going 180 with no chutes out to help straighten me out. I’m over in the middle of the track; I’m still on my lane.”
Then abruptly, Turk’s Mopar made a sudden left turn into the retaining wall. He struck the wall and flipped over before returning to the racing surface and skidding on the roof until it stopped at the end of the track, where it rolled back over on the wheels.
Turk knew the Factory X car would be challenging to drive but certainly never anticipated ending up on his roof.
“I’m going to respond to that in that two ways,” Turk said. “The first way is that I’ve heard for now multiple months, having never driven a clutchless five-speed, I’ve never had a light car that moves around on you because it’s nice because it’s light, but it also moves around. So I had all those things staring at me, and I had lots and lots and lots of people tell me how hard this was going to be.
“Honestly, if I’d have hit the chute button, which my hand was about a quarter inch away from it, and then would’ve straightened up, and I was in my lane, I would’ve slowed down.”
Turk predicted his third run would likely be in the 6.90s because the first two runs had incrementals on that trajectory. This would have been no shock as Turk said his team had prepared generously for the test session.
“We worked hard, and we paid a lot of attention,” Turk said. “We spent a lot of time thinking about what to do with the clutch and what to do with the tuneup or what to do with the chassis settings. It wasn’t like we didn’t think about all that stuff, and we didn’t work real hard on it.
Turk had gone 7.20, 195 on the initial early shut-off run. Yes, the car moved around, but that was the nature of the beast.
“I drove Factory Shootout cars back in the beginning when they were hitting walls all the time, and they’re on little nine-inch tires,” Turk explained. “Even on gear shifts, even though it wasn’t automatic on shifts, and then they would get sideways. Sometimes guys hit walls, get out of control, and still do, but not nearly as much as they used to.
“The cool part about these bias-ply tires is, you bang the shift, and even if you got a lot of clutch in there and it lights the drive shaft up, and the car moves around on, you just drive through that. So I was driving through; if you looked at the run and saw the drive shaft, you’d see I was driving it after every shift, getting it back squared up and going down the track.
“Was it really super hard or challenging? No, it was a blast.”
The decision to rebuild the car was a no-brainer for Turk and his team.
“The night that I brought it home, I limped around a little bit out there in the shop with [chassis builder] Dave Zientara, and we’re out there trying to take it apart, see how bad it is,” Turk said.
Turk went to bed as Zientara assessed the damage.
“I get up next morning; hell, he’s got the whole car part completely disassembled,” Turk said. “We already got the whole plan laid out. We think we’ll be back out in a month and a half, two months. If we can get parts, and the big parts are going to be trying to get the carbon front end or the carbon fire front end again is going to be a pain to get one made real quick, but we’re trying.”
Turk believes he could be back as early as Norwalk.
“The great news is that the chassis held up tremendously, that the only real bend in the chassis was up in the front,” Turk said. “When we built the car we added some cross bracing to the strut towers across the backside of the mid-plate that we thought would stiffen the front end of a bunch, and man, it really worked. And honestly, it probably helped me a lot because it took a lot of the impact load, and it channeled it across the mid-plate bar and shoved that bar together and shoved the engine back. The engine only came back about two inches and the steering rack came back about three inches, so neither of the steering or the engine did any damage to me, thankfully.”
The most significant injury Turk admitted was to his ego, and then there were some smashed-up fingers and a foot he said may or may not be broken.
Fortunately, there was GoPro footage and RacePak data to tell the team exactly what transpired. It was as exactly as Turk described it.
“Thankfully, we had the GoPro, RacePak data, I had Holley data, and skid marks on the track,” Turk said. “People think I jerked the steering wheel when I went and grabbed the chute. I didn’t jerk the steering wheel; I was actually counter-steering to the right because the car bounced over to the left, right about the first mile-per-hour trap.”
The accident now behind him, Turk said he’s itching to climb back behind the wheel, encouraged by the outpouring of support from the racing community. He’s also enlightened as to what not to do next time.
“I had nothing but a blast driving it,” Turk declared. “I didn’t feel uncomfortable; I didn’t feel scared. I wouldn’t be scared to get back in it today. I mean, what I should have done when I put that chute button in that goofy place up by my hoop up above my head, out of my eyesight in a hard place to lift my hand to and hit because I decided I didn’t want it on the steering wheel. I put it up there, and I practiced sitting in the car with all my stuff on, over and over and over to where I could hit it with no problem.
“Well, you’re not sliding sideways, correcting with one hand, driving a car 200 miles an hour when you reach up on the other hand when you do that. It worked on the first pass, so I thought, well, maybe I’ll just stay with the button, which was a dumb, dumb, dumb mistake because I’d had my hand on that lever, gone through there in fifth gear and started, got a little sideways on me. I was correcting with one hand like I’d done all the way down the track, and I’d have a problem correcting it. I would’ve just yanked on that chute lever, and I would reach down, grabbed that lever, and I’d been good and ending the run. “I’d have been high-fiving my wife and Dave saying how great the progress we’ve made getting ready to go make a 6.90 run.” But instead, Turk admits, he’ll have to accept his place in drag racing history.
