Behold my latest nightmare fuel: surprise cows.

The No. 91 Terrible Herbst Monster Energy trick truck (the class more widely known as trophy trucks in other series) encountered a calf being chased by a bigger cow during part of the Parker 425 and man, it did not go well. I’ll let driver Christian Sourapas describe it from here, via the forums:

Before I could even react, we [were] smashing into both of them sending us into a shock and veering the truck to the left. Blood and guts everywhere. I knew it was gonna be a day-ender, but as I was thinking that the truck caught and we started tumbling.

As we were crashing, all I was thinking about was when this was gonna stop. We were in the air for a while, and I was praying to god that this wasn’t it. I was afraid that JT or I wasn’t going to make it. It was scary because I never had thought I had a chance of dying until this moment. It was my first major crash and I didn’t know what to do. Do I relax and take it or do I tense up? All of these thoughts were going through my head. I just wanted it to stop. It seemed like we were crashing forever.

Thankfully, driver Sourapas and codriver John Tondro were both okay, albeit a bit shaken.

You can see the nose of the truck dive down from braking before it hits the cows, but there wasn’t much those brakes could do in response to the surprise bovines with the truck traveling at 112 mph.

You can’t see the dead cows in the video, thank goodness, but you can see the effects of the hit. Any time a real-life camera looks like a video game where your character has been stabbed is bad. Very bad. In this case, it’s because there was a very dead pair of cows and a rolled-over truck.

Even though both of the guys in the truck were fine, the place the truck landed was in the middle of the active course—in the direct path of other 6,000-lb race trucks. Sourapas immediately got out and tried to flag other trucks down to keep them from hitting his rolled truck, which worked for all but one, as he explained on Race-Dezert:

The Herbst Helicopter landed (after flying sideways over Brett to warn him) and they immediately helped on flagging cars down. We put a fire extinguisher in the middle of the course and used our red triangles. We pushed the alert on the Racing Trax but had no idea if it was going to work or not.

A lot of cars made it safely through, except for the #63 of Johnny Angal. If it weren’t for his quick reflexes and superb driving abilities, he would have directly T-Boned (no pun intended) the cab of the 91. He did nail the read of the truck, breaking the right front of his truck, but luckily they weren’t harmed.

Surprise truck is almost as terrifying as surprise cows. If anyone wants hamburgers at the Mint 400, however, Sourapas says you’ll know which pit to look for.

[H/T Duck, blah yawn blah!]