WHEATLAND, Mo. (May 22) — Garrett Alberson loves Lucas Oil Speedway. The track, though, doesn’t seem to want to love him back.
Heartbreaking late-race losses. Bad luck. And crashes — yes, he’s had crashes.
Friday’s qualifying for the Show-Me 100 weekend’s Tribute to Don & Billie Gibson brought Alberson’s latest Wheatland misery. One year after a cut right-front tire hurtled him into the turn-one wall in a preliminary-feature impact he ranked among the “top-five of hard ones” he’s experienced, he went flying through the air in a spectacular series of flips during the third heat race that was even more vicious.
Alberson, 37, again escaped shaken but otherwise uninjured from a car-crushing accident, but his difficult fate at the track was not lost on him. Something just won’t let him conquer the place — a fact that was driven home later in Friday’s program when, piloting his backup car, he took the lead late in the Cowboy Classic postponed by rain from Thursday but couldn’t hold it and settled for a runner-up finish to Josh Rice of Crittenden, Ky.
What’s the hex over Alberson at the 3/8-mile oval?
“I don’t know. I’m not sure,” Alberson said in the moments after the crash. “I love the place so I kind of put it all out there, and sometimes stuff happens.”
The heat-race incident was more than some “stuff.” It was a wild, scary situation, one that came suddenly on lap two as Alberson was leading by a growing margin. His Roberts Motorsports Longhorn Chassis bicycled into turn one and began rolling and gyrating before he even knew what was happening.
“My car was, like, kind of excellent, so I could charge as hard as I wanted to,” Alberson said while still holding his helmet and gloves upon returning to his team’s trailer after the crash. “And the way the car was, actually, like the more speed I carried across the center, the more it all moved and worked.
“I’d driven a similar entry the lap before, and I think I just went and got a little bit more out of it, like mph-wise, and I think my right-front was pretty low, and when it biked it dug the right-front at like the exact same time or something. I was literally like steering in and then I looked like that (flipping).
“A lot of times you can you can feel it coming,” he continued, referring to a car bicycling and digging in. “But when I turned, it was like a Hollywood move. I was like, turn it in … upside down.”
Alberson’s No. 58 barrel-rolled once and then bounded end-over-end. Its nosepiece and front bumper flew off upon first impact with the track and the destruction continued. The rear end twisted. The front wheels flopped. Body panels bent. It finally came to rest on its roof in the middle of turns one and two in a steaming heap of machinery.
“The first hit was like pretty solid,” Alberson said. “I imagine it probably caught the roof on the first rollover. And then after that, I just seen ground and like heard other people's motors. I was like, ‘Whoa, gosh, this is gonna be kind of big.’
“I’ve only landed on my head like that one other time, but that time I don’t remember a lot of like fuel or anything coming out of it. This time, when it landed, you can tell it knocked the carburetor kind off of it and broke something in either the power steering or something. There was oil dripping down the dash. I was like, ‘Yeah, this thing’s a mess. It was gonna take a bit to get out of it, but the (safety crew members) were there quick and I got my helmet off where I could kind of shimmy through there and luckily the door wasn’t caved in."
Alberson said he “kind of bounced my head off the headrest a little bit,” but he went to the ambulance with the paramedics and had them “do, like, a concussion protocol or whatever, just check me out.” No issues were identified and Alberson was taken back to his pit stall. He figured he’d “probably have a headache” and be sore in the morning, but the only real pain he was feeling was some minor irritation to his leg because he had smacked it off the steering column.
The car was incredibly mangled. Two wreckers were required to drag it off the track and through the pits.
Pointing out the severity of the wreck, a thick chunk of mud was visible stuck between the roll bars that protrude just to the left of the driver’s seat toward the left-side window. The bars were added to Dirt Late Models several years ago as a safety measure to give more protection to drivers and it seemed to do its job in Alberson’s instance when the car dug into the soft clay.
“I’ve actually been saved by that thing a couple times now,” Alberson said. “But when they first started doing it and Black Diamond (the Louisiana chassis manufacturer where Alberson worked for several years) adopted it a few years ago, I had a good flip at Davenport (Iowa) and it was the same thing — that bar was just full of mud, and the seat was actually covered in mud. It’s like, if that bar wouldn’t have been there, it would’ve impacted into the seat. For sure, them bars have really saved drivers.”
Alberson certainly felt fortunate to survive the crash largely unscathed. So did everyone else at the track, including his parents, who had traveled from New Mexico for the weekend and were watching from the main grandstand, and his car owner Ken Roberts, who witnessed the accident from the backstretch stands. Alberson’s crew chief, Zach Huston, hugged his driver when he returned to the pits. So did Alberson’s fellow racer Gordy Gundaker, who visited to check on Alberson. Gundaker’s younger brother, Trevor, who was in Alberson’s heat and said he was “shaking” when he saw Alberson’s flipping car, dropped by Alberson’s pit stall as well. And Carson Ferguson, another competitor in Alberson’s heat, stopped his car at Alberson’s trailer after the prelim and called Alberson over to ask how he was feeling.
The night went on, however, for Alberson, who had Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series points on the line. His crew had the team’s backup car unloaded by the time Alberson returned to the pits after the crash and he used a provisional spot to start the 40-lap Gibson Tribute. His troubles continued though: on lap one he spun in turn four when he checked up behind a scramble ahead of him and he couldn’t continue because his car’s fifth-coil, which hadn’t been tightened sufficiently amid the scramble to ready the second car, had come undone.
But Alberson roared back in the 45-lap Cowboy Classic that capped Friday’s action following the Thursday rainout. Still able to start fourth despite a car change because the race had been postponed, he immediately thrust himself into contention. When Alberson overtook Chris Ferguson for the lead on lap 33, it appeared he might be authoring a storybook comeback.
“That was the goal,” Alberson said, “to do the best you can after that (crash).”
On a damp evening, the track surface became increasingly choppy as the feature progressed. Cars were bouncing around. Some bicycled, threatening to somersault like Alberson did earlier. Ferguson, in fact, had gone onto two wheels in turn one right in front of Alberson on lap 24.
Alberson didn’t flinch, though, and charged after his elusive first-ever victory at Wheatland. But he couldn’t quite clinch the deal, losing the lead to Rice on lap 40 and coming home second.
It was another disappointment at the track for Alberson. Second was definitely uplifting in the wake of the accident, but he felt he had once again let a Wheatland checkered flag slip through his fingers.
“I think I did try too hard,” Alberson said. “I just wanted it bad so I was making sure I didn’t leave anything out there. I feel like I get passed a lot of times trying to be too easy and trying to drive too careful. Nowadays, it seems like more than ever you get beat by going too easy and someone just driving harder than you, so yeah, I probably just didn’t play it right and just got too aggressive at times.
“(Rice) kind of got a good little thing going to where he was leaving low, especially off of four where I was kind of sweeping out. And then I started kind of bottoming (the track) late, kind of bottom and out into three, and then it was killing all my speed. I couldn’t make it back up, and then somewhere in there I goofed up to the wall (causing spoiler damage) and that doesn’t help either. It’s such a fast track, anything like that hurts.
“I just made too many mistakes,” he added. “It was a chaotic day, so I kind of let myself get a little bit too worn down and just didn’t think very well.”
Nevertheless, the introspective Alberson was able to consider the positive response to the heat-race disaster.
“It was pretty awesome seeing the guys get so much in such a short period of time,” said Alberson, who locked into the ninth starting spot for Saturday’s $75,000-to-win Show-Me 100 finale. “Like, I was barely out of the ambulance and they had the other car out and already getting stuff put on it.
“I’m just super proud of everybody for sticking with me and believing in me because sometimes it's just chaotic and I do some dumb stuff sometimes. But at the end of the day, like, that’s the job — to go as fast as you can. You have to compartmentalize and just move on with it. And so that part I was pretty happy with. I was able to charge hard despite all that happened. My goal was to just not wimp out, but I probably just tried a little too hard. All in all, it was almost as good as it could be. Just one spot shy there.”
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