LADY LUCK : Muldowney Can’t Pass Chances to Test Fate on Return From Near-Fatal Crash

Think back to the most horrifying situation that you’ve ever been in. A 125-pound, frothing German shepherd charging your bicycle? Dozing off at the wheel of your car, being jolted awake by a loud horn and looking up just in time to see the word “MACK” filling up your entire windshield? How about that night with the obnoxious blind date who looked a lot like the 125-pound German shepherd?

Now, imagine putting yourself in the same situation a second time.

It happened to Shirley Muldowney this year.

It happened for the first time on June 29, 1984, at St. Pie, Quebec. The inner tube in the left front tire of her top-fuel dragster expanded and wrapped around the wheel at 247 m.p.h. With that wheel virtually locked, her car shot out of its lane and slammed into a muddy ditch. A split-second later, the car exploded, spewing fragments of fiberglass and metal through the ditch and across a field.

Rawn Tobler, her chief mechanic and fiancee, recalls the next few moments:

“Most times, in a really bad accident, the car will sort of roll up in a ball or become a tangled mess. But when Shirley hit, it was like the car was a glass bottle. It shattered. . . . When we got to the end of the track all we saw was a hole in the fence where she’d gone through. We were looking for what was left of the car because we figured she would be in it. But there wasn’t any car around.

“She was about 100 yards beyond where we were looking. The biggest piece of the entire car was the seat she was sitting in, and it wasn’t more than three feet wide.”

Muldowney’s feet and legs had been shattered. She spent nine weeks in hospitals as doctors tried to put the pieces back together again. They did what they could, but Muldowney knew from the start of surgery and the long rehabilitation that she would never be the same again. But she also knew she wanted to be strapped back into the seat of a monster machine and feel the incredible rumble of a 2,000-horsepower engine.

And in June this year, two years after her accident, Muldowney found herself back on the same track in Quebec, looking down the same quarter-mile stretch of asphalt that nearly turned her into stew beef.

And at 220 m.p.h., guess what happened?

“A main stud broke and punctured the tire,” she said. “The car turned violently to the left, just like it did two years ago. I could see it happening again. I held my breath for a second and said, ‘Wow.’ ”

Because there are no tape recorders in dragsters, we may never know what Muldowney really said at that moment. But you can bet your house, your children and your mother’s good name that she did not say “Wow.”

But this time, she brought the rocket under control and sustained no injuries. She was able to do this, she said, because she was traveling so fast.

“I swerved to the left and back to the right, in front of the other car, and he never hit me,” she said. “What does that tell you about how far I was ahead of him? If I hadn’t been moving so fast, if I hadn’t made such a good run to that point, he would have have T-boned me. If I was going slower, I would have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Although the crash eliminated her from the competition, Muldowney was spared to race another day. Several of those days have come this week in qualifying for the Winston World Finals in Pomona, the last event of the National Hot Rod Assn. season. And perhaps the best day of all came Saturday, when she turned in the quickest and fastest run of her career, covering the quarter mile in 5.424 seconds and hitting 267.30 m.p.h. The finals are scheduled for today.

Until this week, the 45-year-old driver from Northridge had not had a good season, but everyone who saw her crash two years ago figures she’s pretty lucky to have had any season at all.

In her first major race since her near-fatal accident, Muldowney was the No. 2 qualifier, but was eliminated in the first round in the Winternationals at Pomona in January. In the next event, the Gator Nationals in Florida, she was also eliminated in the first round. Ditto for the Southern Nationals in Atlanta. In the next event, she lasted until the second round before she was eliminated.

On and on it went. Eliminated. Eliminated. Eliminated. Characters in Arnold Schwarzenegger movies lasted longer than she did. She failed to qualify at all in the Spring Nationals in Ohio and was the No. 3 alternate. Muldowney, a three-time national champion, being the No. 3 alternate was akin to Babe Ruth being used as a pinch-runner or having Secretariat pull a wagon full of kids around the park.

Her downfall this season, she insists, was not a result of the accident or lingering effects of her injuries. It was, she said, simply a case of lousy luck.

“It’s been parts failure all season,” she said. “Every single race we found ourselves playing catch-up. We didn’t have a great year with air freight or UPS, and we had to make too many late-night trips to airports to retrieve parts. This was an all-timer in terms of a bad year and bad luck.

“Without bad luck we wouldn’t have had any luck at all.”

Muldowney realized, too, that during the 18 months that she spent in hospitals and recuperating at her homes in Michigan and Northridge, the rest of the drivers and mechanics on the NHRA circuit did not sit around playing Yahtzee and waiting for her to get back on the track. The rest of the drivers and crews were busy coming up with new technology, new ways to ease even more horsepower from their engines.

“They all had a year and a half on us in technology,” she said. “They had been driving with those air-wing stabilizers way up in the clouds and getting used to them. And getting used to the new starting system with all the yellow lights on the starting tree instead of just one yellow light. When we came back, they all had a tremendous advantage over us.”

Muldowney, however, said she may have learned something even more important than the latest crank shaft alignment and newest electronic fuel injection systems. She said that she learned that an old adage might be true: When you have problems, half of the people don’t care and the other half are glad you’ve got them.

“I really, really noticed the change in attitude towards me,” she said. “I found out in a hurry that if you don’t come off the track with the lowest elapsed time, boy, it’s another day. They treat you differently, that’s for sure. It started from the time we pulled our rig into the track and parked it. I learned that people forget. But I also learned that the people who forgot about us, forgot about what we’ve done, those people weren’t really our friends.

“It sure woke me up. In a way, I kind of feel the whole thing with the accident and the comeback and all, even though it was pretty bad, it was a good experience.”

And she said she wouldn’t trade a single second behind the wheel of what she calls those “killer machines” for any other kind of life.

“I feel pretty good now, but I still have my days,” she said. “I have to use medication all the time, mostly arthritis medicine, because I still have problems with my legs and feet. But I know that I’ll always have those problems with muscles and ligaments and tendons and nerves. But the bones are healed. They’re crooked, but they’re healed.

“I guess it’s all been worth it. There isn’t anything that I long for. I think I’m pretty lucky to have what I have, to have done with my life what I’ve done with it. My life has been a good one. I’ve been lucky.”

Those who watched Shirley Muldowney’s car turn itself into flaming oatmeal in a muddy Canadian ditch a couple of years ago figure she’s probably right.