Sad News: Driver ‘Scraped Up’ In Wild Crash At Eldora Speedway

After Saturday’s Dream XXX heat races at Eldora Speedway, driver Dale McDowell climbed the ladder to visit Scott Bloomquist, who was standing on the top of his trailer.

McDowell said, “I’m just checking on you,” to Bloomquist. “That kind of crash is not acceptable for us old guys.”

At sixty, two years older than his racing buddy from Chickamauga, Georgia, Bloomquist of Mooresburg, Tennessee, laughed. Although he understood McDowell’s concerns, he assured him that he was OK. After all, the Hall of Famer had just escaped what may have been the worst accident of his illustrious career during the second heat race.

That Bloomquist was able to spectate from atop his hauler warmed the hearts of McDowell and everyone else in the Dirt Late Model world. There was a true hush that fell over the Eldora property — and no doubt in every home watching on FloRacing — when Bloomquist’s familiar No. 0 went into a wild series of gyrations at the end of the backstretch and came to rest upside down in a smoldering heap.

However, Bloomquist was cognizant when emergency personnel arrived, and he climbed out of his automobile after it was gently turned around. His gait is obviously already affected by the leg injuries he sustained in a motorcycle accident in March 2019 and the hip replacement surgery that followed. He approached the ambulance with caution and waved twice to the crowd before getting into the car to go to the infield care center for a checkup.

“How’s that? It’s just another day in paradise.” Remaining humorous, Bloomquist informed FloRacing’s Derek Kessinger during an interview conducted on the roof of his trailer after he was cleared by the medical staff and dressed for the streets.

Still, Bloomquist was a little taken aback by the development. As the evening came to a close, he was the same self-assured man who had earlier in the day told the autograph session that he thought he could use his heat’s pole start to his advantage to lead the 100-lap feature and collect the lucrative winner’s purse for a record nine times. The half-mile oval, where he has a record 12 crown jewel victories, felt like it had been robbed of his chance to return to glory after the crash left his Terry Wolfenbarger-owned Team Zero machine a wrecked disaster.

The incident happened on the prelim’s fourth lap. After regressing, Bloomquist found himself in a fight for fourth position with Moweaqua, Illinois’s Shannon Babb, who had previously driven Bloomquist’s Team Zero Race Cars. On the crucial circuit, Babb slid high as he emerged from turn two, and Bloomquist quickly overtook him from the inside. In the midst of the backstretch, the right rear of Bloomquist’s vehicle and Babb’s left front corner collided, violently twisting Bloomquist to the right.

In turn three, Bloomquist nosed into the concrete wall a few feet before the metal crossover gate and exploded into two spectacular rollovers that left other cars in the dust. Babb stopped on the track with the rest of the field during the red flag and drove off, getting deeper involved. Bloomquist said Babb was to fault for the mishap.

Bloomquist remarked, “I never would have expected that out of Shannon, of anyone on this planet.” It was really obvious that he wasn’t lifting.

“I felt really confident. I felt like we had no problem getting in the race, and I really felt confident about winning this race tonight. I ain’t really sure what Shannon was thinking there. It looked like, after watching the replay, it looked like he just finished me off and never cracked. You can’t be doing that on a slick racetrack and not be thinking, ‘F— it.’

The only thing I can give him credit for is that my quarterpanel may not have given as easily as he had hoped. However, they aren’t meant to be so easy to offer that you should be able to accomplish that. I’ve caused it to others. I intentionally did it. I’m aware of how it appears, and he appeared to be saying, “F— it.” Being the fastest place on the entire circuit, I wasn’t prepared for that. Really, I was racing fiercely.

The 50-year-old Babb acknowledged that he spoke with Bloomquist, saying, “We did, we bumped.” Yet he referred to it as “a racing deal.”

Babb, who later qualified for the Dream finale in a B-main but had to withdraw early to finish in 26th place, remarked, “We were both racing hard.” “We were just heading down the back straightaway and aiming for the same location on the racetrack when we slid each other twice, maybe a lap apart, in both corners before that. And we struck, we hooked. My door’s T-pole bears a mark from where we struck.

You really don’t want to be struck in the right rear when driving down a straightaway since it will always turn you into a wall. Both of us are going all in, and things happen very quickly. I feel horrible about it, really. I know he didn’t mean to do it, and neither did I. We’re simply going fast.

He continued, “That’s racing here at Eldora.” “I’m simply grateful that he’s not hurt. We can fix race cars, but as long as he’s on his feet, we’re good.

In the end, Bloomquist conceded that he “made some mistakes” and lost his front-row start. When he pulled onto the speedway, it had changed from being a heavy racetrack to one that was slick.

“You’re lined up (in staging for the heat) and once you go past that (commit) line (in the pits) you can’t touch your car,” Bloomquist said. “Then the first heat goes out and you see something that’s not what you expected, so you gotta live and die with basically too loose of a race car, too much stagger.

The tires on my right side were also new. Although I haven’t used these (Hoosier NLMT) tires much, I’ve heard that doing so is kind of taboo. Heat cycles are a must for these devices. Now that I think about it. While we haven’t held many races, these men have been doing this for a few years. They certainly aren’t what I’m accustomed to. Just some lessons you encounter along the way, growing pains.

Bloomquist too found the crazy sequence of flips to be an intriguing experience. In his more than forty years of racing, it was only the third occasion he had rolled a vehicle.

“Well, at Tampa, there was a tip-over. That wasn’t much,” he remarked, bringing up a minor incident at East Bay Raceway Park in Florida a few years prior. However, Ray Cook turned me on that one up north, and I tumbled down the fence like a barrel. That one was excellent.

On September 17, 2010, Bloomquist avoided injury in his previous terrifying flip, which happened in a heat race at Winchester (Va.) Speedway during a Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series event. He actually brought out a backup vehicle and came in fifth in the main event, which made racing history as it was Jonathan Davenport’s first-ever Lucas Oil circuit win.

Although Bloomquist was mostly unharmed on Saturday, he did sustain a laceration on his left hand and wrist, which the paramedics at the Infield Care Center bandaged with blue tape. In addition, he reported having some pain in his left knee and right elbow, and he anticipated experiencing lower back pain in the morning.

Bloomquist claimed he was “present” the entire time of the accident, meaning he was able to remember both its positive and negative aspects, and he never lost consciousness.

“I actually enjoy when there’s nothing hitting, and you’re in the air,” Bloomquist said. “That’s the time you better enjoy, because something’s getting ready to happen. And this one landed on the top hard.

“Here’s the first thing you think when you’re upside down — you worry that one of the first guys that get to your car is gonna have a cigarette and goes, ‘Oh s—, let’s help him,’ and throws it down. You see all this fluid running everywhere and you’re just sitting there.”

Notably, Saturday was Bloomquist’s second hard crash in his last three starts. He took a vicious head-on hit from another racer amid a multicar tangle during May 3’s Hunt the Front Super Dirt Series feature at Ultimate Motorsports Park in Elkin, N.C., wiping out the Devin Jones-owned Team Zero car he was running and thus sidelining him until he put together an Eldora deal with Wolfenbarger, his friend and fellow Tennessee racer.

“I raced 36 years without flipping a car here (at Eldora),” Bloomquist said. “I’ve also never destroyed two cars in two weekends, let alone two cars in one year. I’ve never wrecked this many cars in such a short time ever.”

The two wrecks — sandwiching his 11th-place finish in Thursday’s 50-lap Dream preliminary feature — provided a further blow to Bloomquist’s hopes of coming back strong this season from his array of physical and medical issues, including a prostate cancer diagnosis one year ago that led to successful surgery last summer. He hasn’t won a feature since September 2020 and his Eldora aura has faded since his last victory there in the 2018 Dream (his lone top-10 finish in his last 10 crown jewel appearances is sixth in 2019’s World 100), but he still believes he can make noise on the racetrack.

“It’s tough when you go through as many different things health-wise as I have with cancer and hip replacement,” Bloomquist said. “I’m just trying to keep paying bills and you end up having to liquidate (things). I believe, though, people can see, I haven’t lost a damn thing, other than my financial support basically to be able to continue to do this.

“I just really wanna thank the people that have been helping me to try and get back racing again. Devin Jones especially — he’s not here, he couldn’t make it here tonight. And then Terry Wolfenbarger, he owns (Saturday’s) car. Scot Smith (Georgia driver Garrett Smith’s father), it’s his engine in the car.

“I think we’re way better than people got to see tonight and I just hope like hell I get back here for the World (in September),” he added. “I know I’m not done yet. I know I’m gonna win more races here.”