Youmans debuted the GTO at Middle Georgia Motorsports Park in late summer and then, at the urging of many in the Pontiac brotherhood, attended the Pontiac Nationals. On big tires, he coasted across the 1/4-mile finish stripe to the tune of a 6.68 at 197 mph. He then made his big-show, small-tire debut at No Mercy 10 at South Georgia Motorsports Park in October, with Bunton and FuelTech’s Luis de Leon calling the tuning shots in tandem. There, he clocked a career-best 4.03-second elapsed time in Pro 275 trim, and was confidently targeting a 3-second run in eliminations when, on a competition single, the rear shocks topped out just after the launch, breaking the tires loose and sending him across the centerline and into the retaining wall. The impact buckled the drivers’s side quarter panel and mangled the custom ’70 nose.
“It was going across the track and it was slowing down and I was trying to feather the brake so it wouldn’t slide the tire. And I kept saying, ‘please don’t hit anything,’ and then when I saw it was going to hit the front end I said, ‘please don’t come around and hit the wall,’ but that’s what it did,” he explains.
“We had put some more power in the car and made a shock adjustment before that round to try leaving faster,” he goes on to say. “Our 60-foot had gotten better every pass. Some people ask, ‘you had the bye, why didn’t you break the beam and motor down the track and come back around?’ Well, you’re a racer — the number one qualifier is on the other side of the ladder and he went 3.90. We knew we may have to face him, so we were trying to go 3.90s…we knew we could. You can always second-guess your decisions.”