Driver’s luck holds fast

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Drag racers stake their lives on parachutes to assist their brakes at the end of a high-speed quarter-mile run.

Stephanie Eggum is entitled to feel more nervous than most drivers when she deploys her chute after a 180-mph run in her front-wheel-drive 2000 Honda Civic. But the 26-year-old from Illinois never worries about its reliability.

After all, what’s the worst that could happen?

Eggum already has survived one malfunctioning parachute — while speeding vertically. She lost that race to gravity.

The mishap occurred in 2001 while Eggum was making her 14th free-fall skydiving jump. The lines of her parachute became entangled and Eggum began to spin out of control, so violently she was knocked unconscious. She smacked the ground at about 80 mph and amazingly sustained only a major concussion.

Not one broken bone.

"It had rained for about five days, so it was muddy where I hit," Eggum said.

She is forced to rely on witness accounts because the last thing she remembers was spinning, and she regained consciousness three days later.

Eggum stopped jumping out of airplanes — she’s a smart woman — but needed another way to get her adrenaline fix.

"I was bored. After I put a turbo kit on my Civic, I started to drag race it," she said.

A front-wheel-drive Civic seems an unlikely vehicle to satisfy anyone’s lust for speed, but Eggum’s car morphed into something other than a mundane import with good gas mileage.

She’s likely to be one of the favorites to win tonight’s eliminations in the NHRA Sport Compact Series at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Eliminations begin at 6:40 p.m., followed by the first round of D1 Grand Prix drifting at 9.

Eggum began Friday’s qualifying sessions as points leader of the Hot Rod division, in which she holds the speed record (184.25 mph) and elapsed time record (7.90 seconds). Qualifying was incomplete at the Review-Journal’s deadline.

Eggum’s speed numbers are impressive for any dragster, but her records were produced in a 1.9-liter, four-cylinder Honda GSR engine tuned by crew chief Jeromie Hicks. It produces about 1,150 horsepower.

"It feels slow now," she said of her top speed, having made nearly 300 passes in her career. "Everybody thinks, my God, going 185 is crazy.

"After lap after lap, it’s starting to slow down (mentally). I’ve become better at remembering how the car reacts during a run and can better give that information to my crew chief."

Eggum won three NHRA titles last year and finished second in the season standings in her third year of professional racing. She hopes to move to a faster category, possibly an Alcohol Funny Car in the NHRA Powerade Drag Racing Series.

Eggum has won two of the four NHRA events this year. In all four finals she has raced against Kenny Tran, who won the first two matchups in his 2.4-liter Toyota Scion.

She lost to Ron Lummus in the final round a year ago at Las Vegas.

"We had the best car, but our (transmission) broke," Eggum said.

Her parachute did open, though. If given a choice of parts to break down, Eggum happily votes for the transmission.