Cage Please

My ’87 325is is currently awaiting a full roll cage. I had already decided that it will be done before the next track weekend, but my dad has now made the point a little more clear.

A few weekends ago he was at a race weekend at Thunderhill park in northern California. This is a track he’s raced at a lot and the same track that I drove in Oct. ’07. His first track time on Saturday was a warm up session. Apparently everything was going well – he felt good, the car was running well, great weather – until a Porsche attempted a pass just before his track out point on a turn.

This is a section of the track that isn’t super fast, but still around the top of 3rd gear. This puts it at about 70-80mph. They made light contact, but it was enough to turn the car 90° left. At this point he was sliding sideways off into the grass. Looking out the passenger side window he saw a drainage berm coming and realized that it would trip the car, but was just along for the ride and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. The car apparently barrel rolled several times up a hill and came to rest on the wheels.



He only remembers the first impact, which was upside down, and then sitting in the car after all the banging had stopped. The safety crew did a great job and got him out of the car and ran all the mandatory checks. After an ambulance ride to the hospital for a bunch of X-rays to confirm that nothing was seriously damaged, he headed back to the track to get all of his junk.

The racing community is a great group and a lot of people stepped up to offer their well wishes and help with whatever he needed. They managed to get everything loaded back into the 4Runner and the bashed car onto the trailer (with a forklift) for him.






This car is definitely done, so now begins the process of reevaluating just what he wants to do and probably getting another car. My guess is that once the soreness wears off and the reality of weekends without racing sets in, he’ll be right back at it.

The part that I like is knowing that, with the right safety gear, if things do go wrong, these things can take some major impacts/rolls/tumbles and the driver can essentially walk away. This safety gear isn’t cheap, but I’ve decided that it’s worth way more than it costs.

There will be a nice new roll cage going into the ’87 sometime in the next few months, but I hope to never have to test it this way.