Is it true that Imperials were banned from destruction derbies?
In a Wall Street Journal article titled “Demolition Derby, A Lawless Sport, Gets Some Rules”, Daniel Pearl writes in part: “Derbies were a lot simpler when they began In the 1950s. One bit of folklore tracks their birth to pedestrians cheering a fender bender at an Ohio intersection, but historians credit the first derby to Larry Mendelsohn, a stock-car promoter in Islip, N.Y., who realized that people go to car races hoping to see crashes. The formula: Put a hundred cars in a ring, declare the last surviving car the winner, and let the junkyard carry off what’s left. Complications soon arose. To keep insurance companies happy, some promoters forbade head-on collisions. Weary firefighters won a two-engine-fires-and-you’re-out rule. Hearses, limousines and Chrysler Imperials were banished from most events to keep an even playing field. And environmental regulators started cracking down on antifreeze spills. But the sport’s biggest problem is that it is running out of good cars. Demo dri
