Top Fuel owner-driver Shawn Reed was transported by ambulance to a Seattle hospital Saturday with at least a hand injury following his 290-mph qualifying accident at the Muckleshoot Casino and Resort NHRA Northwest Nationals.
Reed, an area native who fell in love with drag racing at this very dragstrip, was conscious, alert, and communicating with emergency medical personnel in the aftermath of the crash.
It’s unclear at this point why his Reed Trucking and Excavating Dragster had a right-rear tire failure. But it blew apart and damaged the rear wing as he powered down the right lane next to qualifying leader Doug Kalitta. That disabled the wing, causing the car to spin around and nose into the opposite guardwall in front of Doug Kalitta, who providentially had smoked the tires of his Mac Tools Dragster for the first time all weekend.
Spraying shrapnel in all directions, Reed’s dragster ricocheted hard off the wall and slid backwards across the track. The remaining Goodyear slick was shredded in the incident that occurred as Reed clocked a 290.32-mph pass.
Crew chief Rob Wendland rushed to the accident scene and said, “After coming down here and looking at the car, the motor’s intact. I don’t see anything from the motor area or anything like that. The belt’s still on it, but it looks like it lost a right rear tire. It takes the wing out, makes the car turn. And it took a couple bad hits. It took a couple bad hits to the roll-cage area.
“He’s alert. It knocked the wind out of him,” Wendland said, “but I think he’s got a pretty good laceration on his hand from the steering wheel. But he’s a pretty tough son of a bitch. He may have sustained a pretty good injury to his hand, but they’re going to take him to the hospital to a specialist right now to take a look at all that and are going to check him out real well,” Wendland said. “This is his heart and soul, having this race car out here.”
Reed grew up at nearby Puyallup, Wash., and for many years lived in the area at Lake Tapps.
Heading into the weekend, Reed had said how much he’d like to win a so-called “Wally” trophy in front of the hometown crowd: “All I ever wanted is a Wally, so to get that in Seattle would be the most amazing thing ever. I don’t necessarily think the stakes are higher being I’m at my home track, but I do put the pressure on myself to perform and yes, I hope to be successful in front of my hometown friends and family and coworkers.
“The car has been awesome. All year long, our qualifying position has been great. The car’s been running well. We just have had some bad luck on Sunday. We can’t try to change anything up. We’ve just got to keep doing what we’re doing, and pretty soon I believe that the luck will change and we can get that first win.”
The accident delayed qualifying by one hour, 18 minutes.
Tony Stewart, who ran in the next pairing after the one-hour, 18-minute delay, said, “This is one giant family, and everybody cares about each other. Sean’s a good friend of mine. We both have places in Lake Havasu, Arizona. Shawn and his wife were awesome. So thinking about him, thinking about all of our fans here that had to see all that and what went on.
“But it’s what we all sign up for, unfortunately. So when you get the signal from the crew chief and turn the switches on and they get ready to spin the motor over, you just got to lock in and focus on doing your job,” he said. “And the good thing is it’s not like we got to wait for three and a half hours to get out of the car and think about our friends again. So we’ll go back, and I’m going to send Shawn a message right away. And hopefully we get done here with our last round. We’ll go visit him and see how he’s doing.”
Stewart’s crew chief, Neal Strausbaugh, said, “I’m just thinking about the Reed family and what they’re going through right now. It’s really tough to get up and want to be racing after watching something like that.”
