Gary, I just discovered this old thread and I can give you an eye-witness report because the Funny car missed me by about 20 feet as it hurtled across to hit the station wagon. At the time I was working for the AA in London and Phil Manakee, one of my co-workers ran a rear-engined 3.3 litre straight 6 Vauxhall powered rail. A bunch of us went up to the Pod to help crew for him. We had taken the car into the Play-Pen and fired it up on the rollers to check out the engine when they fired up the Funny Car chassis to our left. Fortunately, it was angled across our car's bows. You can see our rail in amongst the crowd in the fourth picture.
They fired the engine and it went onto a fast idle, then down to idle. There's a mechanic sitting in it loosely wearing a face mask and gas mask. He blips the throttle and the car returns to idle. He blips it (I seem to remember) once more and the engine suddenly speeds up and keeps revving. At this point the surrounding crew are panicking. The revs keep rising and some guy tries to stuff his jacket or something into the bug-catcher. By now, the centrifugal clutch has engaged and the tyres grew and pulled the car off the stands. The car goes into a full-on burnout and smokes past the front of our rail maybe 8 feet away. It hits the team's Station Wagon which is sitting in Park and full of tools and heavy batteries. The front of the chassis rams under the tow-bar of the Station Wagon and lifts its rear wheels off the ground, so it starts rolling. Seconds before this all happened a guy was sitting the other side of the Armco barrier in his car watching activity in the Play-Pen. Luckily he had driven off just seconds before Priddle's engine fired up. The Armco was only held by a few bolts and the Station Wagon got rammed through it, across the road and into the ditch. The Funny Car chassis high-centred on the edge of the ditch and the weight of the Station Wagon levered the Funny Car rear tyres off the ground. They grew to max size and free-wheeled in the air. At this point the poor mechanic on-board managed to throw himself forward and pull the fuel shutoff. A split second later the engine stopped and this incredible silence fell over everyone close to the incident. It was punctuated by the voice of the mechanic from the driver's seat, "Oh no, oh no!" The poor guy was in tears, part shock and part realization that their racing weekend was probably over. We ran over so I saw the car at close quarters and it is truly a testament to racer's dedication and skills that they managed to have the car up and running by the next day. There was an awful lot of damage to the front end and fuel tank. It's really lucky that they didn't have the body on the car when this happened and truly amazing that nobody was injured.
I can tell you that it's one of the scariest experiences I've ever had and the noise was incredible. The whole incident from start to finish probably took about as long as it takes to read the first three lines of this report. Being there was like experiencing it in slow-motion.
