Driver returns to the oval after crash

PALMER — Racing through the middle laps of heat two of three, Anchorage's Dallas Dalton had to make a quick decision as he raced three abreast with two other cars. He had two options.

"I could hit the brakes and get out of this," Dalton said. "Or I can hammer down.

"I thought let's do this!"

Dalton's aggressiveness cost him.

The driver of the No. 4 Legends car at Alaska Raceway Park's paved oval tried to bust through the three-wide situation, only to rub fenders with the car next to him, which sent him airborne on a series of wild barrel rolls down the front straightaway.

The car's violent trajectory sent parts and pieces flying, sheet metal ripped itself off and left Dalton's car exposed down to the protective roll cage. Once his car came to a heart-stopping standstill sitting upright, safety crews immediately came to his aid.

Dalton is not the first driver to flip at the Palmer raceway, and he won't be the last.

But as most drivers would admit, racing is a sport with accepted dangers, and crashing hard is one of them.

That's why Dalton was able to return to the racetrack just two weeks later with a rebuilt car and get back to rubbing fenders with Alaska's best. Just the way he wanted it to be.

"What's the point of racing?" Dalton asked. "It isn't fun if you're not three-wide and next to someone."

The sophomore driver finished off his second full season at Alaska Raceway Park this Saturday when the Legends cars wrapped up the summer with the Baby Grands, Late Models and Sprints at the Palmer racing facility.

"I'm just happy to get out there and get to the end of the season," Dalton said prior to the race.

The born-and-raised Anchorage racer jumped into the racing scene in summer 2017. As owner of Dalton Refrigeration, the 27-year-old business owner poured his efforts into an off-time hobby with help from Creech Motorsports and mechanics Keith McGee and David Elliott.

Dalton began racing the No. 4 Legends car at Alaska Raceway Park at the new 1/3-mile paved oval, which debuted in 2016 as an add-on to the already existing drag strip, which has been around for over 50 years.

Dalton said colleague and friend Jason McDonald, owner of Mid State Truck and Trailer and Blue Arctic Waste in Anchorage, clued him into what it takes to race and own a car.

With the help of his own running business and a few sponsors, Dalton was able to get a racecar lined up and decided on the No. 4 to plaster on the side of the door.

Dalton said he has received help from veteran drivers and mechanics such as Mike Thomas, Whitey Davis and Aaron Creech.

By the time July 14, 2018, rolled around, Dalton had settled in among the small Legends community and proven himself to rival drivers that he could wheel it.

An innocent comment by Dalton on the morning of the race eerily came back to bite him.

"I was telling the guys, 'You know, I haven't had a big crash yet'," Dalton recalled in a recent phone interview.

Dalton unfortunately correctly predicted his fate that evening.

After an eight-place finish in the first 10-lap heat of the night, Dalton set his focus on heat two, in which he was starting on the front row in second due to a field inversion.

Since his car was just a few tenths of a second off the fastest cars' times of the night, Dalton said he knew he would have his work cut out for him trying to hold off the faster racers.

"My car was running really good but not as fast as some of the others, so you get used to blocking," he explained. "I get on track and … my car was hooking up, I'm thinking I can probably hold them off."

As the laps ticked off in the second heat, Dalton found himself in a ferocious battle for the lead with Wasilla's Damian Ackerman in the No. 31 machine and four-time Iditarod champion Lance Mackey in the No. 70 ride.

With Ackerman running to his outside, Dalton said Mackey decided to try a run up the inside lane, forcing Dalton into the middle, a precarious spot at close to 60 miles per hour.

"I laid in the throttle, and we all got a little loose, and Lance is probably eight to 10 inches from me," Dalton recounted. "I got loose, tapped Damien, and when he hit the wall, it was game over for me."

Contact between Ackerman and Dalton's cars sent Dalton airborne and into a series of vicious flips across the start-finish line. The majority of the sheet metal, including the roof slab, flew off the car, a matter of seconds that Dalton said felt like forever.

"I was like, 'When's it going to stop?'," he said. "It wasn't until like halfway through that I knew I was flipping. It was almost like I was counting how many flips there were.

"I figured if I'm still conscious, I'm still good."

When the car eventually landed on its wheels — a much better position than upside down, Dalton said — he quickly assessed his surroundings and where he could jump out as soon as he could.

The door was jammed, but the track flagger who was first to his car yelled for him to jump out after spotting fire under the car. Dalton eventually unstrapped his buckles and pulled himself out of the twisted hunk of metal to the roar of the crowd. Dalton flashed the thumbs up sign.

While he was bummed that the racecar was a total loss save for the engine, he was more relieved to escape without injury. Dalton said he had only begun to wear the Head And Neck Restraint (HANS) system in races earlier in the year. The HANS device is a semi-circular attachment that connects to the back of a racing helmet and hugs the drivers lower head and shoulders area, helping prevent the head from moving from side to side in a crash.

"I'm kind of glad I (use one), because I don't know what would've been," Dalton said.

Dalton said the Creech Motorsports team rebuilt the car in less than a week. After his crash, Dalton brought the destroyed remains of the car to the shop for them to look at.

The team decided that only the motor was salvageable, so they took it out and fitted it into a new body.

When he showed up at the track for racing July 28, Dalton was sporting a new-look red and cream-colored No. 4 car, this one a Ford coupe compared to the sedan model that the old car was.

Dalton is still searching for that first win, and his current winless skid is why he most regrets totaling the car.

"I felt like that win was coming that night," he said. "That's why I was so bummed out that I totaled it."

As a racer, Dalton's only objective is to race hard and win.

But as someone who is using racing as a hobby, his true drive lies in having fun and putting on a show for the fans.

"When you get people on their feet in the bleachers and they're pumped up, that's what's fun," he said.