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Wallenda family: Nik and Lijana Wallenda walk 150 feet above racetrack

Wallenda family tightrope artists walked almost 500 feet while balanced over the Charlotte Motor Speedway on Saturday night. Nik and Lijana Wallenda started at opposite ends and performed the delicate crossover on one leg each, 150 feet in the air.

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Terry Renna/AP
Nik Wallenda and his sister Lijana Wallenda perform on a tightrope before the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series auto race at Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, N.C., Saturday, Oct. 12, 2013.
  • By Staff Associated Press

| CONCORD, N.C.

Before daredevil Nik Wallenda began his Saturday night tightrope walk with his sister, Lijana Wallenda, at Charlotte Motor Speedway, he got a friendly warning from Clint Bowyer..

"Hey Nik Wallenda! This track doesn't exactly have a good track record with cables," Bowyer tweeted.

Bowyer was referring to the Fox TV cable wires, used to support cameras, that fell on the track and caused damage to several cars during the last Sprint Cup race at CMS in May.

Wallenda had no such issues with cables though.

Nik and Lijana successfully completed a dual walk across a 460-foot wire 150 feet above the race track Saturday night. The siblings started on opposite ends, and crossed in the middle with Lijana crouched on one leg and Nik easing over the top of her.

"It was exciting to perform together again," said Nik Wallenda, who earned worldwide attention when he crossed the Little Colorado River Gorge and Niagara Falls. "We don't perform like this very often. We've never performed this high and this far apart before and this was the first time in many, many years."

This was the second straight year Nik Wallenda has performed at CMS, but the first with Lijana.

"It's always exciting to perform in front of race fans, for one, because they're such an outgoing audience," Nik said. "And to have them so quiet while we perform — there's a lot of respect there."

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