,
Pat had gone off a couple of corners up the road and was brought to my corner by a couple of officials. The rear of the Ford had gotten light coming out of a corner and did a graceful pirouette sending it over the edge and into the trees ass-first. Later that day we watched the in-car footage and it was almost comical how completely calm and composed Pat was during the accident.
Later that day we would catch up with Kenneth Harper at the summit, the man who recorded the video of the Enviate’s untimely demise (the same man who rushed towards the flaming vehicle to lend aid). At this point we had all heard plenty of recounts of how it all went down, but none of us really understood how close Cody had come to leaving us for good. It took several viewings of making double takes between the screen and Cody to make sure that he really was okay. Watch the video below to see just how quickly things can go wrong.
I can’t think how many dozens of times I’ve watched the brief moment of impact and been completely amazed at how well this unfortunate incident turned out. Now that some time has passed for Cody to process exactly what happened, I caught up with him to get his take on the events.
MotoIQ Obviously you and your team had put forward a tremendous effort into the building of the Enviate, did you keep track of the hours or did they all start to blend together at some point?
Cody Loveland I wish we would have kept track of the exact hours into the car. There were two main thrashes that occurred, one in March when we built the chassis which had just over 300 man-hours into it. The next thrash began Memorial Weekend and extended until we left for the Peak; exact hours were not logged. We had 4-5 guys on the car for 16-20 hours a day, for three weeks straight, so, presumably close to 1000 man-hours went into the car.
MIQ How did the car feel off the line when you started that first practice run? What do you think caused your crash?
CL We tested the car the Sunday we arrived, and the car felt GREAT. I found the limits a few times, but it was on purpose to see how far I could push things. Tuesday’s Practice day was NOT about limits; it was supposed to be a couple of quick runs up the mountain, mainly to gather data so that I could tune the car to elevation later that night. I had a pretty hard launch off the line, and right away the car felt a little squirrely in the back end. Like something was “loose”. I shrugged it off as cold tires and pressed on. The first corner was fine, I was just cruising, not even 5/10th’s. The second corner was purposefully slow-in, and on accelerating out, barely ½ throttle, I heard a very loud “BANG” behind and to the left of me. Instantly after the noise, the car went loose, and I was staring straight into the eyes of the spectators behind the boulders, through my side window.
