Big Crash: Monster C7 Corvette Takes Long Flight At Drag Strip

200-mph Corvette covers length of football field in flight, driver escapes unscathed

Radial-tire drag racers live on the knife-edge of grip. The top class of these maniac machines, the (mostly) open-rulebook Radial vs. World, put down up to thousands of horsepower, meaning drivers struggle to get that to the ground. Daniel Pharris is among the quickest of this quick class, but at last weekend’s Outlaw Street Car Reunion at Tulsa Raceway Park last weekend, the Alepa Racing C7 Corvette that Pharris was driving used that power to leave the ground altogether with an incredible and terrifying flight.

Urban Hillbilly Videos captured the Vette crash from multiple angles, including a very telling in-car view that shows the car standing on its big back tires at the top of first gear, followed by Pharris seeing only sky for two full seconds before coming down hard. The exterior views show the monster machine taking to the air around the 330-foot mark and slamming down right on top of the eighth-mile marker, which means his 3,500-horsepower machine flew the entire length of a football field in two or three seconds. That’s a seriously big crash.

A post on the Pharris Motorsports Facebook page notes that the car just got the wrong amount of air under it once it lifted the tires and the Corvette took flight despite the driver doing everything right: “Daniel did all he could to pedal and bring the car back down but the wind was under it and absolutely nothing he could do. In mid air, he had the presence of mind to reach up and hit the parachute handle to make sure the chutes were out when it came down in the midst of everything going on.”

After skidding another eighth-mile, Pharris incredibly pops open the door and calmly walks to the back of the mangled Corvette to flip the electrical killswitch to the off position. The Corvette looks like a write-off from a glance with its chassis clearly twisted, but the good news is that Daniel Pharris brushed it off like it was nothing. Radial drag racers are some tough dudes. The mended Corvette had qualified #1 at the Tulsa races and run through the Tulsa Radial vs. World field to the semifinals, where the car took flight.

Here is the original video from MotorManiaTV, who were streaming the event, along with the multi-camera view from Urban Hillbilly. 1320 Video also did a short feature on the car last November.