I was also there when that happened. That was probably the most aesthetically beautiful air racer I'd ever seen, our airplane was significantly faster but looked as if it'd been hobbled together from a bunch of parts compared to MAII. They had an aviation paint company as their main sponsor and that airplane was turned out! It looked like it was going 500mph on the ramp. Cross pollination amongst the teams was very common and that wasn't limited to needing a part or some knowledge when someone needed help, the folks that support the folks that are actually working on the planes are irreplaceable. There was a group of folks, mostly female, that were the backbone of every team. Every team had someone that would tell you to knock it off for a few minutes and insist you eat a sandwich and drink some water. These ladies were always conspiring amongst themselves, sharing ingredients, sandwiches and anything else they could to keep the Circus Of The Rodeo running. Our den mother and MAIIs den mother were tight friends and after the accident she came to our trailer and she was broken. I've seen people die racing airplanes more than once but the thing that hit the hardest to me was walking back into the pits on Sunday and the only evidence of the MAII team being there was a memorial in their pit, they cleaned up everything in the middle of the night and left.
Lear 23 wings (and horizontal) aren't optimized on an 8000asl racecourse, that's not what it was built for. That airplane was built to try to break the 3KM world speed record. They didn't need to race at Reno, they chose to. Lear wings are optimized for speed at high altitudes, and they're good at it. I honestly don't think they ever thought they'd win Reno, they wanted to set records for distances much higher than 3K and I think the airplane could've hit some very high numbers at altitude.
I watched it buckle • in real time directly in front of me. That sort of ingenuity is considered dangerous these days. Okay, we'll stop. Show us what you'd do.
