Local driver braces for derby smashups
With the interior stripped of its seats, door panels and much of its dash, the navy blue, rust-spotted 1966 Ford Custom in front of Calvin Heilman looks like a beast.
The car is in the home stretch of preparations for Sunday’s demolition derby at the Saskatoon Ex. Heinlan gazes at it with pride, reminiscing about how he originally bought it as a project car. Smiling, he says it purrs when the engine turns over.
He admits it probably won’t stand a chance when it goes bumper to bumper against the sturdier, bulkier Dodges and Chevys over the weekend.
“Going in with this car is like bringing a knife to a gunfight,” he says. The Ford has a weaker front end than the competition. It could crumple like tissue paper if he takes a hard enough hit.
“What’s going to happen is this is going to cave in fairly easy,” he says, gesturing toward the car’s hood. “I’ll have to do as much as I can to protect the front end of this thing and use the back end.”
A truck driver by day, Heilman moonlights as a derby and oval track racer by night, so few areas of his life don’t put him behind the wheel of a vehicle.
His in ter est in automobiles stems from his youth, when he joined his father, Gerald, in the garage as soon as he could walk. Soon after, one of his stepdad’s uncles introduced him to the car-crushing world of demolition derbies.
Now, Heilman’s following in his father’s footsteps and turning his own garage into a family affair. He points out footprints criss-crossing the dust along the same hood that could force him out of the derby early. They were left by his sons, Cale and Leeland, ages eight and five. The boys like to help him apply coats of paint as he prepares for competition.
When finished, the car will be reinforced top to bottom: tubing along the doors to protect them from side impacts, a support bar rounding out the interior roof to stop cave-ins should it flip, chains strapping the bumper to the frame and welding along every six inches of any seams to keep them from splitting open during a collision.
These precautions are all fairly common, but they haven’t kept Heilman from walking away with his share of injuries. He lists off gashed elbows, bruised ribs, whiplash, even burns — nothing too serious so far, and the adrenalin pumping through his veins prevents any single incident from standing out in his memory.
“You’re scrambling to grab a different gear; you’re going from reverse to forward; you’re trying to dodge hits. To pinpoint one, I can’t really do that,” he says.
After a derby, the crashes have left him with pains for days in muscles he never knew existed — but he didn’t get into the sport for the scars or the glory, he says.
“Smashing a big, old, solid car into another one and to keep going — it’s kind of a battle. It’s last man standing. There’s a lot going on in there in a short period of time. It seems like forever, and yet it’s probably all over in 10 minutes,” he says, adding that third place in a previous Saskatoon Ex derby is the closest he’s come to a win.
“I haven’t done all that great, but that’s not really why I do it.”