1971 Challenger Indy Pace Car Crash

[Mr70]

Had no idea this even took place.Glad no one died.
http://bangshift.com/general-news/videos/wild-video-the-infamous-1971-indy-500-pace-car-crash/

[njsteve]

Very well known incident in the Mopar community. Eldon Palmer was the victim of a ton of bad luck that day - 1) someone moved/blocked the braking alert cone, 2) another guy blocked his only escape route back on to the apron of the raceway by waiving him off - directly into path of the stands and 3) most importantly, in the prior days of practice he had been driving a car with the optional front disc/rear drum brakes. On the day of the race they had him drive a four-wheel drum brake car. If you have ever driving a Cuda or Challenger with four wheel drums you know what happens when you panic stop. The brakes shoes instantly fade to zero and you have no braking ability whatsoever.

Everyone recovered and the car which had relatively minor cosmetic damage was repaired and Eldon still had until a few years ago when it was auctioned off.

[Mr70]

Amazed he didn't roll it over.
We could have lost Chris Schenkel,Tony Hulman & John Glenn right there.

[The Boss]

Surprised none of the MFG's offered up a car?

GTO convertible paced the Southern 500 that year.

[Lee Stewart]

Surprised none of the MFG's offered up a car?

GTO convertible paced the Southern 500 that year.

By 1971 the muscle era was over and advertising $ were being channeled elsewhere so none of the MFGs supplied a car.

[flyingn]

why would he brake as soon as went into pit lane? He was hard on the throttle and beat the indy cars across the start finish line he was going so fast half way down pit lane. The pit row is plenty long enough to stop if ya started braking soon enough

[njsteve]

Why? Because this was a 1971 technology car which on average would take a couple hundred feet to stop at 120 mph with the horrendous drum brakes of that time.

[StealthBird]

Not sure why the blogger states "the footage has never been seen before now". The footage has been out there for the past 46 years. It's been widely discussed, dissected, and analyzed for the past 10-15 years or so on the web. But I guess that's what bloggers do, they make everything sound like it's "just been discovered".

The Pace Car maintains a high speed down the pit lane in case they wave off the start due to the cars not forming up properly. The pace speed is 100 mph. In the case of Eldon Palmer, he was just inexperienced. He wasn't expecting the car to go a little off kilter when he slammed on the brakes. When you hit the brakes hard on a classic muscle car, the wheels tend to lock up immediately (have lots of classic footage of muscle car road tests showing 4-wheel smoke shows from 70 mph and the car going sideways). Palmer was probably not expecting this and panicked.

After this incident, Indy used ex-race drivers, or people experienced with handling fast cars, so this would not happen again. That lasted until 2001 when they stuck John Mellencamp's wife in an Olds Bravada and let her do the pace lap. She was a fashion model, the first woman to drive an Indy 500 Pace Car, and the Olds Bravada was the first SUV to pace an Indy 500. After 2001, they let anyone drive the pace car that had a movie to promote, TV show to promote, etc. There was Morgan Freeman, Lance Armstrong, Colin Powell, Guy Fieri (TV chef), Robin Roberts (TV newscaster), Jim Harbaugh (NFL), Josh Dumahel (The Transformers movie), etc.

There were quite a few GTO's that paced races around the country, many were unknown until recently. Have a few really cool photos found in the archives of the Pontiac-Oakland Museum that will be shown in a future article for POCI's "Smoke Signals".

Mike