LS-Swapped Mustang Suffers High Speed Crash When Chute Fails to Deploy
This LS-swapped Mustang was using all of its 2,300 horsepower to rip off crazy quick passes before things went south very quickly.
As most are well aware, drag racing – or any kind of motorsport – can be done safely, but there’s always the possibility that things can go wrong. We’ve seen this time and time again via some pretty horrific crashes caused by anything from driver error to equipment failure, and even though they’re largely rare, these sorts of incidents do happen. The latest comes to us from Hot Rod‘s Drag Week event, where an LS-swapped Mustang owned by Nick and David Diehl smashed into the wall at high speed, leading to an alarming accident.
According to Hot Rod, the Diehl brothers had been performing quite well at Drag Week leading up to the incident, joining the 200 mph club in their LS-swapped Mustang last year, in spite of its smaller 10.5-inch rear tires, averaging 7.4479-seconds in the process. This year, they were doing even better, ripping off an impressive 6.838 at 206.42 mph during the very first stint at Maryland International Raceway. The next stop was six hours away at Numidia Dragway in Pennsylvania, which is where things got sketchy.
The LS-swapped Mustang was a bit too aggressive in the cooler air, forcing Diehl to lift when the car’s smaller radial slicks lost traction on the first pass. The brothers then made some tweaks to the car’s FuelTech FT600 engine management system to help keep it under control, which is pretty hard to do for a car that’s cranking out 2,300 horsepower and trying to hook with that smaller size of a tire, in all fairness.
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On that second pass, when the boost kicked in, the Mustang got a bit wiggly, prompting David to lift as the car approached the finish line. However, for whatever reason, the parachutes didn’t deploy, and that’s when disaster struck, as the pony car started to lose control before smashing into the wall. The poor Mustang suffered serious damage as a result, but thankfully, David was able to exit unharmed and walked away on his own accord.
Unfortunately, this wreck put an end to the Diehl brothers’ attempt at taking home a Drag Week win, and now, they’ve got a lot of work to do to get the LS-swapped Mustang back on track, literally and figuratively. Regardless, on the bright side, at least no one was injured in this horrific accident, as things could have gone much, much worse.
Photos: Sick the Magazine/Facebook
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