A young woman died Saturday while learning how to drive three-quarter midget race cars on a speedway in Middletown, NJ, the Asbury Park Press reports. Police say Amanda Gambacorto, 21, was driving behind another car when she lost control and hit the track wall head-on at about 12:30pm. The Green Flag Driving Experience, which was conducting the lesson, says on its website that its three-quarter midgets "are small-scale race cars with a very high power-to-weight ratio, which use four-cylinder engines" and can top 90mph. Police were investigating the crash Saturday.
The family was too distraught to talk to media, but Fox Sports reports that Gambacorto's aunt posted this on Facebook:
- "Her family is beside themselves with grief. We can all spend countless hours trying to make some sort of sense out of this horrible tragedy but it seems that in situations such as this one there is no sense to be made and no answers to the question 'why?' All that there is are broken hearts, shattered dreams and a young life that ended way too soon."
She "was [a] fiery spirit who would try anything once," according to a Facebook post by a fellow student at Stony Brook University, where Gambacorto studied environmental humanities and philosophy, the
Stony Brook Statesman reports. The owner of a restaurant where she worked summers remembered her as "bubbly and friendly," and said "she had a lot of friends and a lot of big plans for her life. [Her death] hasn't sunk in yet." (More
auto racing stories.)
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