Jianna Salinas is recovering from an accident while testing at Bradenton Motorsports Park on Tuesday at the track located in Bradenton, Fla. There were no significant injuries reported. Still, a statement from the team confirmed she was returning to California to recover. 

Multi-time NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle champion Matt Smith, who manages the Salinas Family's Scrapper Racing Pro Stock Bike team, said the cause of the crash came from parts failure, which could not have been diagnosed ahead of time. 

According to Smith, Salinas had just completed a routine eighth-mile pass where she did "100-percent" of what she was supposed to, and a fork failure sent her careening off the bike in the shutdown area. 

"All we were doing, making eighth-mile passes, and she's just lucky we were only making eighth-mile passes after seeing what happened," Smith told CompetitionPlus.com. "She'd run a little fast in the eighth-mile passes. She had shut it off. The clutch was in. Cut the bike off. And we all turned around and started walking away because she had done well. Going straight down the track."

Then Smith heard a scream, and it was one he'd heard before. 

"He goes, 'crash! Crash! And we look up, and all we can see is dirt," Smith recalled.

Smith and his team raced to the shutdown, where they found Salinas as shocked as they were. 

"First thing I asked her, I said, 'Are you okay?" Smith said. "She's like, well, yeah, but my arms hurting and this and that. And then I asked, "what happened?"

"She goes, 'I don't know. I never hit the brakes yet. She goes, all of a sudden the left side dropped and then all of a sudden the right side dropped, next thing you know, I was on the ground. I don't know what happened but, she was clear that she never touched the brakes."

Once Smith was sure Salinas was okay, he walked over to the crashed back. As Smith points out, "One hundred percent, the front fork tube. The left one broke first, and the right one broke. And at that point, you're just along for the ride."

Smith believes the incident sends a clear warning to NHRA and its Pro Stock Motorcycle competitors that if they are running the smaller forks on their bikes, they are doing so at their own peril. As he sees it, as the horsepower and torque of these bikes [such as the four-valve Suzuki] continue to increase, it's an accident waiting to happen. 

"I've been on the phone with NHRA tech and I'm trying, pushing real hard," Smith said. "I've sent them video, the forks. I've sent them in the video. Everything. I am trying to get this resolved to where we don't have this happen in our class again and get these smaller fork tubes off the motorcycles. All your V twin bikes have bigger fork tubes, and all the Suzuki's have these old small fork tubes and they don't need to have them on there going as fast as we are and having the weight that's on the bikes now."

Smith said there was no indication the failure was imminent.

"Two of the straightest runs she's ever made on a Pro Stock Motorcycle," Smith said. "Going down the track looked really, really good. She was confident everything was going good. What happened was nothing that she did wrong at all."

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