COOS BAY — Suddenly, the track lights went out, plunging the Coos Bay Speedway into near darkness with only sparse lights allowing the Saturday-night crowd to see.
The burning remains of a car in the darkness at Coos Bay Speedway after it sat in the afterburners of The Beast, a jet dragster driven by Jeff…
The night's racing was complete, the preliminary heats, trophy dashes and featured main events all finished for the night's five classes of cars.
In front of the grandstands, the jet car roared to life, its white lights blinking to warn near-comers. Just as suddenly as the lights went out, the jet fired, providing heat and light and the smell of burnt steel and rubber. For about a minute, a small blue car was rendered black and nearly shapeless, its body scattered into sparks.
In the jet car cockpit sat Jeff Atamian, the creator, owner and pilot of what he calls The Beast, a Korean War-era fighter engine jet built into a dragster that he takes to small tracks across the western United States and does exactly what he did Saturday night: make a pass or two and burn a car.
“I’ve done many, many, many (car burnings) and I’ve never seen one,” Atamian said. “I don’t have anyone that’s a photographer, so ... we don’t get to see what we do.”
Atamian remembered seeing two jet-powered dragsters at his home track with his cousin in Fresno, Calif. in 1967 or ’68 and, as he said, he got bit hard by whatever bug was around the track that day.
The Beast crew chief Mike King leans on the camper rig before the jet dragster made a pass and melted a car on Saturday at Coos Bay Speedway.
Over the next 25 years or so, he always wanted to get a jet and make it a car and drive it.
He finally got an opportunity in the early 1990s when an untouched engine taken straight from a plane and given to Phoenix University came up for sale. Atamian bought it and set to work creating The Beast.
He subsequently acquired two more jets to provide insurance for anything going wrong with The Beast. The parts are difficult to find as they are no longer being made, so having backup engines isn't a luxury. It's a necessity.
“You don’t want to get rid of anything,” Atamian said. “When you break something, you don’t throw it away because the part that’s broken might be better than the next part. You can’t buy these parts. You can’t go to AutoZone or Pep Boys. This stuff’s not available.”
Atamian, and his crew led by Mike King with Brian Atamian and Randy Brown, started touring on weekends in 1995, taking The Beast to Albuquerque and Denver and all up and down the Interstate-5 corridor.
At Coos Bay Speedway, Atamian thrilled the crowd both with a display of the jet car's speed and by burning the small blue car.
The Beast raced down the speedway's 1/8-mile strip at speeds of nearly 300 miles per hour.
That speed only scratched the potential of the engine built for combat.
“I wasn’t at full power,” Atamian said. “What you heard was not full power.”
But that was only the appetizer to what The Beast offers. Burning a car was an idea that came out of some brainstorming. It’s not hard for some guys to come up with the idea when they have a jet on their hands, and so they started burning stuff — cars, buses, RVs, though those don’t work well with their fiberglass, Atamian said.
“It’s great the crowd loves it,” he said. “It’s nothing more than a fireworks show.”
And as quickly as it appeared, The Beast was gone.
As local firefighters rolled up the hose used to put out the fire which belched black smoke into the air, The Beast was already in its trailer starting its trek back to I-5 for an upcoming show in Sacramento.
