Tracy Mulls Snake River Cannon Jump

It's seem silly to have to say this, but 99% of everything below is made up.

Champ Car World Series veteran Paul Tracy is preparing to jump the Snake River Cannon in a golf cart, according to sources close to the driver.

Speculation has swirled since the weekend of Nov. 4 when Tracy (show at right modeling a possible jumping costume) broke his shoulder blade in an accident in his home town of Las Vegas.

Initial reports had Tracy getting hammered and trying to jump a golf cart over sand dunes. Later Tracy said he was "playing around with an ATV that I own and it just got a little out of hand; I flipped it over and it landed on top of me."

The injury will cause Tracy to miss the Champ Car season finale Nov. 12 in Mexico City.

Sources close to Tracy said the golf cart story is closer to the truth. For months Tracy has been working with super-modified golf carts in an effort to match the glory of Tracy's idol, Evel Knievel. Friends of Tracy who asked not to be named said the Forsythe driving star was testing out some JATO (jet-assisted take-off) tubes recently mounted on his golf cart.

"He was all right coming off the first dune, but then I think he might have hit a bird or something and the cart just drifted on him," said one witness to the accident. "Landed kind of on the front corner. Could have been a lot worse. Thank God it was sand. When we ran over to him he was saying something about 'goddamn bad aero package.' He was pretty delirious."

Knievel launched his mega-stunt bus-jumping career on New Year's Day 1968 by crashing in an attempt to clear the fountains at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. On Sept. 8, 1974 Knievel tried to jump the Snake River Canyon in Idaho in a specially constructed rocket powered "Skycycle" that looked a lot like a plain old rocket. Even though he cleared the quarter mile wide chasm, strong winds blew the malfunctioning parachute back into the canyon, landing just a few feet from the angry Snake River.

Tracy apparently is on a mission to avenge Knievel's Snake River failure, but in a super modified rocket-powered golf cart. Insiders said Tracy got the idea for his second career after his brief experience in the stunt-focused, high-showmanship world of NASCAR.

Another story that Tracy was injured when he tried to prevent someone from passing him during a golf cart/ATV race could not be confirmed. The theory seemed to lose plausibility when sources confirmed that Tracy nemesis Sebastien Bourdais was miles from Las Vegas at the time of the crash.

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