The full scale Pond Racer was JUNK. If you had been around it, you would fully understand why another was never built. There were two main reasons it was slow. First the Nissan engines were being run at power levels they could never tolerate, and the tight packaging made cooling them near impossible. The second was basic aerodynamics, mainly intersection drag. The cause of the crash was an engine fire. They had suffered several fires in that aircraft before as well. The design put the pilot in the center pod away from the engines which was thought to be safer. The problem was the forward swept wing. When the fire started, it burned through a fuel line, and raw fuel followed the leading edge of the wing straight TOWARD the center pod. Another problem was the canopy. It could not be jettisoned in flight. It instead had an explosive rope to blow it clear and allow the pilot to jump. It is thought that Rick decided to try to ride it down instead of setting off explosives in the direct path of a stream of fuel. If he could have jettisoned the canopy, he probably would have been able to jump clear.