Larry Dixon likened his ghastly accident during Saturday qualifying for the Amalie Motor Oil NHRA Gatornationals to "going to Disneyland and being on a roller coaster and you fly off the track. You just wait to land and hope everything is doing its job for you."

The average theme-park-goer would be traumatized, if not mortally or severely wounded and most certainly emotionally scarred. But the C&J Energy Services Dragster driver was upbeat shortly after his spectacular ordeal at Gainesville, Fla.'s Auto-Plus Raceway. He was making jokes but, more importantly, celebrating the safety devices the NHRA has mandated since his similar crash and worse results in 2000 at Memphis.

"I'm here, talking to you, and last time that wasn't an option," Dixon said. "My car's a mess, but I'm here. Everything did its job.

"I've been through worse. Last time I did that, I had a helicopter ride. So this one's definitely better," he said, thrilled that – in his words – the car got "whoa-ed up" quickly.

The Memphis crash, in which Dixon also became airborne as his chassis snapped apart, left him with a broken leg. He said in that first accident, "my eye literally popped out of its socket. The fact that I'm here, talking to you . . . no broken bones . . . I still got both eyes . . . all the improvements in the car in the last 15 years since I last did this have made a difference."

Dixon complained of a slightly sore upper back and knee. "It stretched an MCL or something like that," he said, but was quick to say, "Nothing took a hit."

He contrasted Saturday's ugly ride with the 2000 wreck.

"With my crash in Memphis, they didn’t have HANS Devices. They didn't have seven-point harnesses. They didn't have the head pads they got nowadays," the three-time Top Fuel champion said. After that event in 2000, Dixon said, he ordered a HANS Device and was the first to incorporate it into his safety equipment long before the sanctioning body ordered its use.

Dixon said he had no fear while he was flying into the air in the back portion of the dragster and the front section was sailing above the height of the track's three-story control tower. And he acknowledged that might sound perplexing to anyone who isn’t a race-car driver.

"I don’t know that you can explain it unless you do it," he said, "but I feel invincible in that race car. Driving to the racetrack, with other people on the road, you don’t have a HANS Device, you don’t have a helmet, you don’t have these harnesses. Driving to the track, I'm more fearful for my life than I am in a [10,000-horsepower, 330-mph-potential] car.

"A car like that," Dixon said, referring to his Bob Vandergriff Racing-owned dragster and the beating it took Saturday, "is designed to go through that and let me talk to you here. No fear. You just count on all your equipment to do the job for you. The end result is I'm fine."

That, he said, is why he never worries that something disastrous will happen to him on a pass. I said, "I shouldn't [feel that way]. That's why we have rules. That's why we wear helmets and HANS Devices, and things like that. You learn from all these incidents, and you try to make them safer so you can go through stuff like that and be OK."

Another difference between his two memorable accidents, he said, was the fact that this time he was conscious. "I got knocked out in that one [at Memphis], but this one, I was awake for it." Roll-cage padding, including extra head protection, contributed to that.

Speaking to reporters just after Safety Safari emergency medical personnel checked him out and released him from their care, Dixon said, "I was up [airborne] for a long time. That's all I know. I was really happy I stayed on the track. I'm wanting to land on the track and not in the dirt. That's the biggest deal, because going that fast, it ain't good for your insides if you go tumbling like that. It hits hard. It hits real hard. But at that speed, using the asphalt to scrub off speed and get you 'whoa-ed up' is huge."

As he addressed the media, Dixon said the car, in all its jagged, twisted pieces, still was impounded, meaning the team hadn't gotten a chance to examine the debris carefully and extensively. However, he could share some thoughts about the car with certainty.

"For sure the front half failed. The front end just broke," Dixon said, puzzled that it would break apart. He said he figured fatigue was not something that would have worried any crew.

When something similar happened to the U.S. Army Dragster several years ago at Seattle, Tony Schumacher explained that problem using a credit-card analogy. He said it's like taking a credit card and flexing and bowing it repeatedly – eventually the car will break along the crease line. He said a Top Fuel dragster chassis behaves the same way if it bends in the same place over and over.

Dixon said neither he nor his crew is ready to pinpoint the exact cause, but he indicated fabrication work or lack of it just wouldn't have occurred to him.

"We're figuring the car's got somewhere around 60-70 runs on it. So it’s not like it has a lot of runs on it. It shouldn't have done that. There's no rhyme or reason for that," he said. "When I raced for Alan Johnson in 2010, I started out with a brand-new car, ran through the entire season, won 12 races, [went] testing and everything . . . Long story short, that car had maybe 150 runs on it before we front-halved it. So this one was way under those kind of numbers to need a front half."

Dixon's take on the ill-fated pass was that "the car was scootin' pretty good. It looked like it was on a [3.]77-78 run. It wouldn’t have been pole, but it would've been probably second-quick. When I got out, I was almost expecting to see something with the back half that caused the front half to do what it did. And when I got out of the car and looked at it, everything's there."

The NHRA reported that Dixon will not race Sunday in eliminations. Team owner Vandergriff, rocked by the incident in just his third race away from the cockpit and expressing responsibility yet plainly as helpless as an onlooker as Dixon was a passenger, suggested he wouldn’t put Dixon on the track Sunday. And Dixon, though admittedly not having spoken at that point with Vandergriff, teased that everyone would have to tune in Sunday to find out whether he would, as the official No. 6 qualifier, race first-round opponent Antron Brown.

Instead of preparing to meet the Matco Tools/U.S. Army Dragster, Dixon indicated he might be making a trip to the hospital Saturday evening.

"Maybe. Why not?" he said, agreeable to a follow-up exam.

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