NOTE: Some of the accompanying pictures are similar. Usually, I don’t do this, but I didn’t want to leave out even a smidgen of action with this particular car. The sounds and what you feel watching this car go down the track is like no other! Seeing this thing in action is a unique experience!

Beaver Springs Dragway – Step into the pit area of the Wicked Sinsation jet dragster, you might expect a flamboyant character just as flashy as the car as a driver. Instead, you’ve find the charming and down-to-earth Dawn Perdue, who in her LinkedIn profile, describes herself as “A small town girl from PA.” It only takes a few minutes to see she is a genuine and gracious host to anyone who stops in to her pit, especially the youngsters anxious to meet a driver willing to pilot a jet engine down a race track. You might wonder what kind of person it takes to do such a thing, so this article is going to find out just that.

It obviously wasn’t her first rodeo, so I asked just how long she’d been doing this. With a big grin on her face, she replied, “I’ve been driving this car, this is actually a new car, we got it last year, but I’ve been driving the Wicked Sinsation about five years.” Five years of experience driving one of these beasts surely qualifies her as an excellent pilot. But what led her to arrive at this point? How did it all start? When I asked her this, Dawn explained, “I grew up in the racing world. My dad was racing when I was born and I was actually in diapers running around the track. And then my mom started racing and my brother, so when I was little it was in my blood. When I turned 16, they put me in a piston-engined car. In 2009 to 2013, I was with 422 Ford Motorsports, driving two of their Fairlanes and a Galaxie.”

I’ve seen the 422 Ford Motorsports cars in action, and they’re great to watch, but in comparison to driving a jet dragster, there’s obviously a difference. I asked Dawn what she likes best about driving the dragster. Her eyes lit up and the already-present smile widened with her reply, “There are two things I like, running this, I feel like it’s a roller coaster ride, and I’m the cargo. It brings out the crowd and I love meeting people and seeing kids, and putting the kids in the car to get their pictures and stuff like that. I like going fast, yes I do, but it’s the fan interaction I love the most.” It’s the way she interacts with the younger fans that is the most pleasing to watch, and there’s a reason she feels it’s important for the extra attention and caring she shows towards them. “We’re all getting older and we need the new generation to take our places.”

If you’ve ever seen a jet dragster up close, you know they’re not for the faint-of-heart, so I asked what the scariest part of getting in this car was. Her smile faded to a thoughtful look, and Dawn replied, “The scariest thing is just knowing the bad thing about this is we normally lose somebody every year in these things, so we have a bad rep. Just knowing in the back of your head you don’t know when it’s your time, I mean, it’s racing, but these things have a mind of their own and you know with the fires if we hit the wall, we just explode. It’s definitely something you can’t explain with these cars, but you never get used to them.”

I observed that it was probably a good thing not to get used to the car and getting too comfortable and complacent with it, and Dawn explained a bit further what driving it was like. “It’s definitely not like, okay, you go on and get in your car every day and drive in to work and go, ‘okay I can drive this thing.’ Sometimes I get in there and go ‘today I don’t know if I want to go down the track or not’ but I still do. The bad thing with this is it’s 5Gs going down the track and negative 7Gs when I pull the chute. It’s all fun until you hit the finish line, but then at the finish line you know you’re going to get hit with the chutes. When these chutes hit, they hit hard, it hurts, your eyes feel like they’re going to pop out of your head, you get an instant headache, I feel like I’m 100 years old getting out, my back’s all humped over, so it’s fun until the finish line.”

With all the physical demands of driving the car, I asked her if she could see herself driving this thing as long as she could. Her face once again lit up with a reply that at this point wasn’t surprising. “Yes, absolutely! I’ve had opportunities to drive top fuel, but I love these jets. Something about ‘em, they’re crowd pleasers, I will take a jet over a top fuel car. This is a cheaper way of going fast.”

These days, in the racing world, everyone pitches in to take care of the car, often with each pit member having a specific task. With Dawn growing up in a racing family, I was curious about what part she played in taking care of the dragster beyond driving it. She revealed, “These things don’t have much maintenance to ‘em. I check the pipes to make sure there’s no cracks in them. When you see me start up, you’ll see the smoke come out, it means we’re just checking for cracks in the pipes. Pretty much these things are very easy to work on. I fill it up, we bleed it for air in the fuel, and pack the chutes and that’s it. It’s very simple. Not bad at all. It’s hard to find these parts in these engines, that’s why not a lot of people have these things, because they’re hard to find. And if people have them they keep them or they charge a lot of money for them. If they were easier to find, a lot more people would probably be driving them.”

On this day, Dawn Perdue piloted the “Wicked Sinsation” dragster to a speed just shy of 300 mph. If you were there, it was a sight you’ll never forget. If you wasn’t there, you better make plans to see this car and driver the first chance you get!