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Hailie Deegan Discloses Scary Details of Her Face-Off With Fire and Smoke in Atlanta

Published 03/22/2022, 10:55 AM EDT

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NASCAR Truck Series sophomore Hailie Deegan came face-to-face with a pretty scary situation in the recent race at the Atlanta Motor Speedway. She was trapped in her truck, which was on fire, her cockpit filled with smoke.

And to make things worse, she inhaled a cocktail of smoke and fire extinguisher chalk.

This was something she revealed in her recent YouTube video.

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“We made pit road, and it was really on fire at this point and there was like, bunch of black smoke and stuff,” Deegan described. “They hit it with the fire extinguisher. It blew out the black smoke and fire extinguisher smoke in my air hose and throughout the whole truck and I couldn’t see anything.”

“So I inhaled that and I started choking. Then I started to not being able to get more air in, like suffocating.”

Hailie Deegan knew “something was wrong” even before her crew spotted the fire

After she made contact with the #91 truck, Deegan got a flat. So she headed into the pits, but she soon learned the damage was more than a tire.

“I knew something was wrong ‘cos like the moment we went out, I was like, ‘Something’s not right guys.’ And my back started getting really hot,” she recalled.

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“It ended up eventually catching on fire and I think it was on fire for a couple of laps because my back started getting super hot. They figured out that I was on fire because I can’t see the truck like that and so I was like, ‘Screw it, I’m gonna drive back. If I can get to pit road, they can put the fire out and maybe we can keep going.'”

via Getty

Fortunately for the young driver, she jumped out of the window just in time.

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Although it took her a while to catch her breath back, Hailie Deegan escaped from a situation that could’ve been far worse had she been stuck in the truck for a few seconds more.

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Written by:

Shaharyar Khan Chauhan

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Shaharyar is an F1 & NASCAR writer at EssentiallySports. A graduate in Journalism from Amity University, he has been a passionate follower of motorsports for a better part of the decade. A Max Verstappen and Ferrari supporter, he dreams of a pairing of the two in future.
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