There are some images a son can never forget. Billy Glidden was barely an adult when he watched his dad, the legendary Bob Glidden, barrel roll his Pro Stock Thunderbird in the lights during the 1986 NHRA Southern Nationals at Atlanta Dragway.

Glidden, now 51, is competing in the NHRA Pro Modified division this weekend at the NHRA Summit Southern Nationals, but the horrific vision remains branded in his memory bank.

"I was hoping he was going to win," Glidden recalled. "I can’t say I saw it in slow motion, but with the car, you could see something happened from the starting line. Then everything kind of just disappeared. You could actually see the car come above the dust line every time it would flip up. To say the least, your heart sinks. That’s your life. Dad, mom, this was all we’d ever done. It was a bad feeling."

Glidden had seen his dad crash before but nothing like this. He recalled nothing was salvagable on the car.
 
And the most memorable vision of the incident was not the barrel roll for many, it was an uninjured Glidden emerging from the car to quickly cover his engine's intake manifold with his racing jacket.

“I ran all the way down to the crash site, and when I got down there, he instructed me not to let anyone lift his jacket off the manifold," Glidden recalled."

Bob Glidden's team was not as heavily funded as one might assume, so the need to return to competition as soon as possible was a must. The team did return, but the results were subpar by Glidden standards.

"The crash destroyed our data, our Racepak, so we raced for a little while with no data recording," Glidden recalled. "We weren’t running very good."

Glidden said without the data he needed to walk down the track about 300 feet to see if the car could speak to him.

"I finally told him, ‘You’re short shifting really bad," Billy Glidden explained. "Obviously he didn’t want to hear that. A couple of runs after that, we started running really good. We were over 2,000 points behind in the points and when he finally discovered he was short shifting, we instantly started running really well. We ended up winning the points by over 2,000.”

Glidden had his own Commerce moment in 2004 while racing in the Fun Ford Series.

"I was in the same lane, I was in the right lane," Glidden explained. "Right as I passed the finish line, the ‘chute came out and the car made a hard left-hand turn and I almost hit the left wall. I cut the wheel, stomped on the brake just one time and the back end came around and I never touched the wall, but rolled right down the wall the whole time.

"I remember that more than I remember dad crashing. I had to go out the very next run and actually something happened with the tree and we had to re-run that pass. We won that race."

Ironically, Bob won his race too.