Not one to waste time, Billy Glidden is taking the opportunity to improve his program following a crash during qualifying for last weekend’s ADRL event at Heartland Park Topeka.

It marked only the second time in his career that the 2008 ADRL Extreme 10.5 champ found the wall with significant force.

“I’ve been pretty fortunate, but the first time was (about 1997) in my very first car that me and a couple of buddies built in a garage in Seymour,” he recalled. “It wasn’t built to do what we were doing with it. I had slapper bars on it—I wasn’t using them in the conventional method—but it pulled one in two and when the car got down on the rear tire it cut it and then it was pretty much the same thing, it went from the left lane over to the right and it pretty well slapped the whole right side of the car.”

Not one to waste time, Billy Glidden is taking the opportunity to improve his program following a crash during qualifying for last weekend’s ADRL event at Heartland Park Topeka.

It marked only the second time in his career that the 2008 ADRL Extreme 10.5 champ found the wall with significant force.

“I’ve been pretty fortunate, but the first time was (about 1997) in my very first car that me and a couple of buddies built in a garage in Seymour,” he recalled. “It wasn’t built to do what we were doing with it. I had slapper bars on it—I wasn’t using them in the conventional method—but it pulled one in two and when the car got down on the rear tire it cut it and then it was pretty much the same thing, it went from the left lane over to the right and it pretty well slapped the whole right side of the car.”

This time around a broken left rear axle was the culprit that sent Glidden’s Extreme 10.5 Mustang careening from the left lane and head on into the right guardwall, while Dan Saitz managed to slam on the brakes and squeeze his ’97 Probe past without further incident.   

“It went a half a second and that’s when it broke. Everybody said that it shook, and it probably did, but one tire quit turning. So that happened at half a second and at eight-tenths of a second I was on the clutch pedal, pushing it in already and it was no big deal at that very moment,” Glidden said.

“It started to go left, so I just pushed the clutch in, turned the wheel to the right a little and that’s when it just took off. I would say that the tire, when it tipped—because it didn’t come off or anything—when it tipped it turned into a drive tire and apparently made the car turn to the right.”

Following the impact, Glidden’s ride rolled over and slid to a stop on its roof. The man inside suffered only a banged up left elbow in the melee, but the car sustained serious damage to its nose.

Glidden them performed trackside surgery to remove the nitrous-fed, big-block motor and transmission before immediately sending the car to Jerry Haas Race Cars in Fenton, Missouri, to receive a new front clip and body work at.

“The engine that was in the car, it looks okay, but I still need to take it apart and make sure that it didn’t suffer some blunt trauma,” he said. ”The car is at Haas’ shop now, which is the absolute best place it could be, but I really don’t know if it’ll be ready for (the next ADRL race, July 16-17, at) Houston.”

So, Glidden rolled out his venerable, Fox-bodied Mustang, hoping to make a Mickey Thompson tire test with it at Milan Dragway in Michigan before entering Outlaw 10.5 competition in the Pritchett Brothers’ inaugural Ultimate Outlaw Shootout Series event this Saturday (July 10), also at Milan.
“We’re just trying not to sit on our hands and trying to find a combination that’s going to work better on the other car,” Glidden explained. “It’s got the small-block in it, but with our Hemi engine I’ve got to come up with some different driveline ideas. I’ve just got to do something different.

“We’ve only got, if you count them all, total testing and all, 18 usable data runs now on the Hemi. I mean, that’s all we’ve got, but that’s enough that I can tell what I can do with the small-block I can’t get away with on the Hemi, or big-block, or whatever you want to call it.”

Plus, Glidden has his eye on the future.

“The rumor is that I’m still supposed to get this thing from Sonny (Leonard)—that’s from Sonny himself—but that started a year ago. And that’ll be a little bit bigger engine, but will probably give me even more issues, so I don’t want to just sit on my hands while the car is being worked on and repaired by Haas.”

And though one membership remains for the five-man Mickey Thompson 3-Second Club for ADRL Extreme 10.5 entries, Glidden insisted his motivation lies in keeping pace with his rivals.  

“I don’t even think about (the club). You know with Naiser and Millen not being in it, and then Michael Neal, Kenny Doak, there are lots of people out there that I consider have the power to get that done easier than me. I mean they don’t have to make really good runs to run like they are, but I do.  

“I mean, right now I’m typically six-hundredths or as much as a tenth off in just the 60-foot right now, so if I could get just that back without anything else added by the acceleration of the car, we’re going to be right there.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say we can run as quick as some of those guys, you know, a 3.93 or that kind of thing, but how we’re running is not really indicative of how we can run, because I’m making really bad runs, pitiful,” he claims. “We definitely can do better.”