NHRA Pro Stock’s Eric Latino Reminded That Sometimes a Driver Needs to Lift
Pro Stock’s Eric Latino, Pro Stock driver and co-owner of the KB Titan Racing organization, woke up Saturday morning and felt in great shape. He was stretching and doing his morning calisthenics – and then he remembered what had happened about 12 hours before. His Chevy Camaro got out of shape, crossed the center line, veered right, smacked the guard wall and erupted in a massive ball of flames and sparks. It flipped onto its roof and skidded to a stop upside down. But Latino walked away from the ugly mass of melted parts – after crew member Joey Gladstone helped free him from the wreckage.
“I woke up this morning not even realizing I was in a crash [Friday] night,” Latino said. “I just got up, walked around, I go,,’Wow, I can't believe this.’ I'm touching my toes, and I come back up and it's like, ‘Wow. I feel great.”
Amazingly, his Chevy Camaro, for all the abuse Friday, actually was in relatively decent shape, too.
“I thought the car was a write-off. I looked at it this morning,” Latino said Saturday. “I'm telling you, all the wheels are dead-straight, control arms are straight struck in the car. It just tweaked the front end and scuffed the body. Need a new body, need the front frame section. But as far as all the suspension components and everything, they're all solid Inside. Cockpit looks pretty good.”
He recounted the experience: “It was like the car was slowly going left and I'm trying to bring it back. The car's accelerating hard. It's going to go left. And it just got too far, and I said, ‘Man, you know what? I should have lifted a second ago.’ It happened so quick. I was told that the track has a real narrow lane and you don't have much of a groove here. But to me, it was pretty good until I got the fourth gear, and the fourth gear, I should have just packed it in. I've been up and down a track probably 1500, 2,000 times. So I know when to lift, but there's times where if the groove is real wide, you can just bring the car back around and keep going. Maybe I should know after racing for 35 years, but I raced mostly in Canada. I only came here once in 2020. Then I ran here last year. So I still don't know what tracks are great, which ones are not.”
His KB Titan Racing partner Greg Anderson earned Friday night’s Stampede of Speed qualifying bonus - $7,500, sitting in tidy stacks in a fancy briefcase - at the NHRA Texas FallNationals. But he looked at it wistfully, knowing that money had wings on it as soon as he received it. Anderson said, “I got this briefcase full of money, and most of it's coming out of it to pay for the car.”
That they could make jokes, even cheerless ones, is a blessing. Anderson and Latino both knew they can make more briefcases full of money, that the human treasure is what’s irreplaceable.