Las Vegas driver on collision course in demolition derby

Andrew “Pinkey” Carmean’s car — the one with the “17a” on the side, the gold, black and red paint job and the Vegas Golden Knights design touches — is basic as a car can be.

Really, the former 1988 Lincoln Town Car is nothing more than a gas tank, batteries and a roll cage mounted on four wheels. But what the beat-up chariot lacks in conventional beauty, it more than makes up for in kinetic lethality.

That’s because Carmean will be driving it this weekend in the inaugural Casino Battle Royal Demolition Derby at the Core Arena at the Plaza in downtown Las Vegas. The family-friendly event Friday and Saturday will feature 100 drivers, and Carmean, 26, is the only Southern Nevadan scheduled to participate.

Jonathan Jossel, the Plaza’s chief executive officer, believes it will mark the first time that a demolition derby has been held in downtown Las Vegas. But, he says, given the buzz the derby has been attracting — the event was heading toward a sellout earlier this week — “it seems like something that should have come a long time ago.”

The rules of demolition derby are viscerally simple: Drivers in beat-up, stripped-down cars try to hit and disable other drivers’ beat-up, stripped-down cars while avoiding being hit and disabled themselves. After a series of heats, the cars and drivers left standing give it one last go, and the driver of the last still-operational car wins.

‘You’ve got to MacGyver it’

Carmean, 26, drove in his first demolition derby when he was just 13. He competes in several events annually — mostly in California, Utah and Arizona — and his best finish has been second place.

Demolition derby is a family tradition for Carmean. His father, Steve Carmean, drives, and his grandfather drove occasionally, too.

“I remember (watching) my first derby as a little baby,” when he was about 2 years old, Andrew Carmean says. “It’s in our blood, and once it’s in your blood, you can’t get it out. You just want to do it more and more.”

Steve Carmean figures that the family has stripped and rebuilt 30 to 40 demolition derby cars over the years. “You give (the kids) a screwdriver and take a car apart to get out what you can with a screwdriver, and once they’ve gotten that out, we’d come and finish.”

“You strip everything out of it,” Andrew Carmean says. Then, the car is rebuilt with derby-ish touches, although there are times when “you’ve got to MacGyver it. You’ve got to engineer some funny stuff.”

The Lincoln cost $150 — about $100 of that was covered by his sponsors, Carmean says — and then rebuilt over about two and a half months. This will be the first time Carmean will be driving it in competition, and — demolition derby being what it is — it could be the last time, too.

“You could be done in one run or get five or six or seven runs out of it,” he says. “It really depends on your style of driving. Are you going to hit full-on, or are you going to strategize about it and pick your shots as you go?”

‘A good adrenaline rush’

Count Carmean as a strategist, picking precise shots that will, for example, break an opponent’s axle or deliver another mechanically lethal blow.

At the same time, he adds, “if I see something, I’m going to take a shot.”

This weekend’s event will run two classes: stock class (classic Detroit metal) and mini-car class (’80s and ’90s front-wheel drive foreign and domestic cars). But the lure of crashing into stuff transcends definitions, and Steve Carmean notes that demolition derbies have been run with combines, buses, vans and even riding lawnmowers.

Driving in a derby can be dangerous — there’s a reason the cars are required to have roll bars — and while serious injuries are rare, Andrew Carmean says drivers typically feel aches and pains the next day from all of that jostling, ramming, steering wheel hanging-on and general in-car bouncing around.

The trick, he says, is to “act like you’re drunk, because if you stiffen up for a shot, you’re going to hurt your muscles. If you realize when you get hit, your body just moves and you’re just going with it. The more you try to fight it, the more you’ll be hurting the next day. You definitely don’t want to tense up.”

But Carmean figures a few aches and pains are worth it in return for the thrill of doing something that’s otherwise frowned on in polite society.

“It’s a good adrenaline rush,” he says. “You have a lot of people take out (their) anger going to the gym and things like that. I take it out in my car, and I’m not getting into trouble for it.”

Contact John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280. Follow @JJPrzybys on Twitter.