The "Missouri Missile."

For a couple of years while I was pretending to attend college I was a paid "stringer" for some car magazines.

A stringer is somebody who takes photos "on the come."  Not paid to take them, but if one or more is found print-worthy, then the magazines will buy it.  And what they were paying for were photos and copy from our smaller Midwestern drag strips.  As in, cars going really fast in a quarter mile.  

As it happened, I lived close to Kansas City International Dragway at the time, which was a pretty big deal back then.  It was a big strip in a big town that wasn't Los Angeles.  Where almost all the Midwestern action was centered.  But the magazines knew there was a vibrant drag scene across our fruited plain.  And they wanted some pictures.  And I was glad to help out.

i recall one race in particular.  It was the American Hot Rod Association's Summer Nationals.  A guy named Lou Cangelosi was attempting to break the then A/A Top Fuel Dragster record. It was 8:01 seconds at the time and 199.02 mph, in 1,320 feet.*  

Cangelosi's dragster, named the "Missouri Missile," was the most beautiful car I'd ever seen.  It was painted a flawless creme color over a rich purple, with a 24-karat gold pinstriping separating the two.  Everything that was metal on this car was chromed, and it shined like a diamond in a goat's a*s.  When not racing this "rail," as they're were called, since they're 20 feet long and skinny, it went on the show car circuit, so fans across the Land could ogle it.  Up close and personal.  And trust me, it was ogle-worthy. 

Well, I'd bought a really nice Nikon camera with a telephoto lens (shooting pool for money paid well).  And I was going to get some killer shots for Hot Rod Magazine, and Motor Trend.  And Auto Week.  And any other mag that would buy them.  So I decided to position myself in a lone tree about 10 yards past the finish line.  I climbed up about 12 feet in the air and got comfortable.  Strapped to a branch.  While I waited for the finals.  And good ol' Lou's record-blasting effort.  

It was to be memorable, as you'll soon learn.  

This was back in the days before super-lightweight disc brakes.  They were still using iron-lined drum brakes, which weighed about 20 lbs. per axle.  So Lou had his crew remove the brake drums to save weight.  So he could race himself into the record books.  

Lou was 65 years old at the time, and that was considered old back then.  He'd sold his dragster to an unnamed buyer and decided to retire from racing.  But not from his Day Job as the Mob Capo in Kansas City.  An actual Italian mobster drag racer.  Go figure!  So he decided to throw caution to the wind for this, his last race.  After all, he had a parachute, right?  He'd use the parachute to stop him from 200 miles per hour, right?  It had always worked before, right?

So I'm strapped to a branch in a tree.  Cangelosi and another racer pulled to the line.  They both did a burnout to heat their tires and pulled into the starting beams.  I'm snapping pictures like crazy.  The "Christmas tree" counted down and the green light blinked on.  The drivers left the starting line in a cloud of smoke and the roar of 3,000 combined horsepower, and headed toward me.  Furiously.  And loudly!  The sound of a Hell unleashed was on the way!  Within a veritable eye blink they whizzed past me and toward the strip's end.  With their chutes hopefully blossoming.  

Oh but wait!  Cangelosi's chute popped out, and then ripped off!  It had torn loose.  And without back brakes, stopping it was impossible.  Lou's car made an awful "whoo-oom, whoo-oom, whoo-om" sound as it whished by.  For just a couple of seconds.  And what was to happen next is still talked about in Kansas City.

It seems like this dragstrip decided to put one of those train railcar siding thingies at the end.  One of those wooden ones.  There was a quarter mile of dragstrip, an eighth mile of shutoff space, another 100 yards of sand to stop anything, and finally, this siding ramp.  The kind you use to get on up to the level of a boxcar so you can load and unload it.  Up at sort of a 45-degree angle, made out of wood and iron.  And the Strip's owner had decided to put one at the dragstrip's end in the unlikely event, he thought, a car might STILL need it to come to a stop.  If it was still rolling, that is.

Well, fellow Pilgrims, the Missouri Missile was still rolling.

Screaming by, as it turned out!  With nothing to slow him down, Cangelosi went by me at about 180 mph!  The sand slowed him down to maybe 130 mph.  And then he hit the boxcar siding ramp a good 100 mph.  And it launched him into the air like a Falcon rocket!  

I'd guess he vaulted at least 150 feet into the air from that siding ramp!  And then it pirouetted ever so slowly over to its left, and then morphed into a dart.  With the front end pointed straight down.  It made the most awful crunching sound as it crumpled into the Earth.  And then exploded into a cloud of unburned nitromethane.  It burned furiously.  And completely.  Into nothingness.

And of course I was so gob smacked by the whole thing I neglected to take any photos!  It was all I could do to keep from falling out of that damned tree, fergod'ssake!  

Needless to say, by the time the firetruck arrived Cangelosi was toast.  Literally and figuratively.  Burned along with his car into a crisp.  And the Missouri Missile was yesterday's news.  You could put what was left of it easily into the bed of a pickup truck.  Somebody told me they turned it into a coffee table.  

And Lou Cangelosi had retired.  Permanently.  

How's that for irony?

My photos of the wreck and the fire made Hot Rod Magazine and I got a check.  But it could have been a lot bigger if I'd taken photos of this "once-in-a-deathtime" event as it unfolded,  instead of watching it fly by with my mouth open.

Kinda' makes one wonder about karma.  Or is it "Carma?"

*   The current AA/F "Top Fuel" record stands at 3.66 seconds at 341.34 miles per hour.  To think:  Over twice as quick and nearly twice as fast as 50 years ago!  And more than 11,000 horsepower!  And we thought it was fast back then!