Image via Southern Pullers Association/Facebook
Dramatic video footage shows a heavily modified diesel truck engine catch fire in two back-to-back runaway events. Thankfully, nobody was hurt in the incident, but things got pretty intense once the engine fired up the second time and the flames started shooting out again at a recent tractor pull event.
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You see the truck pull the sled until it stops. Usually, the driver will switch off the engine immediately after he can’t keep the sled moving forward. It seems he did but a runaway event kept it going anyway.
That’s when flames erupted from the engine and event staff rushed in to put it out. They did extinguish the flames and the driver shut the engine off. But the engine fired up again in a second diesel runaway and the flames towered out once more.
Diesel runaway is a strange phenomenon where the engine keeps revving even though you’ve shut it off. This is from a fuel source, oftentimes oil, entering the cylinders, which causes the engine RPMs to climb higher than usual.
As the engine continues to race, it can cause severe internal damage as well as spark a fire. If a truck is moving when this happens, the result might be a serious crash.
Sometimes a manual fuel pump is to blame. We would assume a truck used in tractor pulls would have a fuel cutoff switch, so that likely wasn’t what happened here.
In motorsports, when you push the envelope you’re liable to make things break. And when things break, bad stuff can follow. That’s partly what makes competition so exhilarating and yet so dangerous.
A videographer who said he was at the event claims there was a separate oil fire that started in the middle of the sled pull. He also says he sled operator tried pull the kill switch on the truck, but the mechanism failed. By the time the driver got out and engaged a second kill switch at the back of the truck, damage from the fire made it so the shut off’s guillotine wouldn’t engage.
Image via Southern Pullers Association/Facebook
