[Gene Durso endured an incident in which, coming off the downhill turn onto the straightaway, his yellow ’74 Spider slid off the track to the inside and hit an embankment, demolishing the entire driver’s side.  Gene and his driving instructor were a bit shaken but are fine; the Spider didn’t fare as well and is considered a total loss.]

I am still trying to figure out what happened. It seemed that I was doing a typical slide into the straightaway and suddenly the back end just hopped out on me. I have been in similar situations but never had the back end jump out as quickly as it did this time. I countered with a left-hand steer, hoping to ride it out as I had done before on the uphill, but the rear end just seemed to keep sliding out on me. After that, it is hard to remember details. I do remember, however, thinking, "I'm losing it – better put both feet in!"  It seems, though, that by the time I did put both feet in, the car was off the track in the grass. Everything then happened really fast. The car seemed to be on ice. Then I saw myself at about 180 degrees going sideways into the dirt embankment. Boy, did it smart... The frustrating part was that I missed the tires by about five feet. This probably would have reduced the impact on both myself and the instructor.

I have a few thoughts on what might have happened:

1. Most likely scenario in my mind is that I was just going too fast and the back end just started to slide away from me. On top of this my position seems to have been the worst section of the track. There seems to be a dip or ripple in the track at the point where I lost the rear end. In looking closely at the video it seems that right after the tire breaks away you see the car bounce. I think the dip in the track made it impossible to recover from the slide. This is consistent with Jim Hayes’ statement that he saw dips on the track in the area where I lost it. I am fairly sure that the car was at its limit with non-racing tires on a cold day.  When it hit this slight dip, it was all that was needed to swing the rear end around out of control. I also checked the speed for that lap – it was approximately 1:16, according to the clock. This is probably faster than any lap I have ever done with the Yokahama AVSi street tires. My best time with the racing tires has only been 1:13.9

Or maybe:

2. The cold track caused the usually gradual response of the tires to be more abrupt than I have seen in the past. Perhaps, with all the great go-fast stuff that Paul Glynn did for my Spider, the power may have too much for these tires. I was only running on my street tires as mentioned above. The last time I ran with this power I had the racing tires.

Or maybe: