A man who crashed his drag racer at 200km/h - flipping at least four times - says he's "sweet", despite bending the steel steering-wheel column with his chest on impact.
Avon Compton was resting at his Nelson home yesterday after crashing his "one-off" drag racer during the NDRA southern dragracing nationals at Motueka Airport on Saturday.
The 56-year-old digger driver was doing a "by-run" at the time, which meant he was alone on the track and not actually racing.
"Because I had a by-run, I could really wind the boost up and sit on the start line and really give it death," Compton said.
"It was really going well, [I was doing] massive burn-outs - probably the best ones I've ever done - so we knew the car had a lot of power in it," he said.
"So we took off, right up in the rev-range, whacked it into second and it just started drifting slightly towards the grass."
Compton suspects that one of the tyres may have swollen in the sun, causing the car to peel off to the right.
He tried to pull back but by then it was too late. The front of the car dug into the grass verge, flipping "at least three or four times" - the dust cloud was so big it was impossible to tell how many times it actually flipped.
