Grenade: This Pro Mod Engine Becomes a Fireball

Engine explosion caps an absurdly crappy year for a two-time HOT ROD Drag Week™ winner.

Tom Bailey has endured a rough couple of racing months. The two-time HOT ROD Drag Week™ capped all of it — two crashes and blown-up engine in short order — with this fireball.

Bailey was racing his Hurst Oldsmobile Pro Mod at the Summit Shakedown at Norwalk when the engine let go spectacularly, as TheRacingVids caught. The Michigan racer escaped with some singed eyebrows but no other serious harm. The engine? Well, it was probably in more pieces.

This came less than a week after the 4,000-horsepower, twin-turbo V8 in his Sick Seconds 2.0 Camaro fragged itself. That came on Day 2 of HOT ROD Drag Week™ at the end of a 6.3-second pass. The connecting rod was just chunks inside the block after the run.

That Pro Mod-style ‘69 Camaro won Drag Week in 2015 and was the favorite this year with Jeff Lutz out of competition. However, fate held a different outcome and Dave Schroeder’s nitrous-fogged, 872 cubic-inch Chevy Corvette won the whole shebang instead.

Two engines? Isn’t that just drag racing? Well, it is, but Bailey’s Sick Seconds 2.0 smacked the wall hard during testing just a few weeks before Drag Week started. Early in the run, the detachable steering wheel came off in his hands while ripping down the strip in his low-6-second monster. He fixed that in time. However, he tapped the wall in final testing just two days before Drag Week tech inspection.

If we know Tom Bailey, we know he’ll quietly shrug it off with “That’s racing.” And we know he’ll be back, likely with something bigger and even more badass. You can’t keep a good racer down. And in the meantime, maybe we’ll see him run the original Sick Seconds, the first car to run Drag Week with a fistful of six-second timeslips.