For the past year, NHRA Top Fuel racer Reed has learned to live without a left index finger. It was amputated after a high-speed Saturday qualifying accident at the 2025 Muckleshoot Casino Resort Northwest Nationals at Pacific Raceways that also left him with a pin in his thumb and multiple broken ribs.
Something else he doesn’t have one year later is a definite explanation of what caused the rear tire failure and a domino-effect injury to a spectator from a detached front tire.
All that Reed and crew chief Rob Wendland have from tire manufacturer Goodyear so far is the assertion that “there was no smoking gun,” meaning it had determined no discernible cause for the tire failure, Wendland said. “After they got all the pieces back—they collected 99.9 percent of all the pieces, so they said, put it all back together, [they] gave us a presentation and said that there was absolutely nothing that they could find for the reason for that failure to happen. There was nothing that was punctured. There was nothing that was, material wise, [wrong] with the tire that they could figure.”…