As Melanie Troxel pulled off the track following her quarter-final loss to Cruz Pedregon during the NHRA AAA Finals, the engine on her In-N-Out Funny Car refired sending the Toyota through a retraining fence and into a parked trailer in the Pomona shutdown area.
Troxel was uninjured save for bruises on her legs.
“The adrenaline takes over in a when something like that happens,” said Troxel. “I’m not really feeling any pain. The equipment that’s been torn up out. The racer’s trailer that I ran into out here. It’s a terrible thing to tear other people’s stuff along with your own. The good news is that no one got hurt.”
As Melanie Troxel pulled off the track following her quarter-final loss to Cruz Pedregon during the NHRA AAA Finals, the engine on her In-N-Out Funny Car refired sending the Toyota through a retraining fence and into a parked trailer in the Pomona shutdown area.
Troxel was uninjured save for bruises on her legs.
“The adrenaline takes over in a when something like that happens,” said Troxel. “I’m not really feeling any pain. The equipment that’s been torn up out. The racer’s trailer that I ran into out here. It’s a terrible thing to tear other people’s stuff along with your own. The good news is that no one got hurt.”
Troxel, a veteran nitro racer with wins in both Funny Car and Top Fuel divisions, said this was the first time an accident like this had happened to her.
“When you’re coming off of the track, the fuel’s off, the ignition’s off, and I know it can happen with just the engine turning over with the clutch welded like that,” Troxel explained. “I would have never thought there was enough fuel in the cylinders to do that. When it fired up, I really didn’t have any options of where to go. There were race cars and tow vehicles or a fence and what was over on the other side. I just got lucky there were no racers or fans.”
