Drivers involved in horrific wrecks refuse to let the memory linger

In the Bristol International Speedway press box, they thought Michael Waltrip was dead. One writer even jumped to the phone to call his office and give editors there a quick heads-up on the fatal accident, one that was certain to make news across the country.

Then Waltrip rose from the wreckage of his race car, a dead man walking. After the savage nature of one of the worst accidents in NASCAR history, it had gotten really quiet at the race track in Bristol, Tenn. Then the collective sigh of relief when Waltrip showed movement in the middle of the barely recognizable remains of his race car was almost audible.

That was April 7, 1990. Waltrip had hit the edge of the crossover gate at the track during a Busch (now Nationwide) Series race, and his car had exploded into a jigsaw puzzle of pieces. He escaped without serious injury. He was only 26. Considering the violence of the crash and the fact that Waltrip had cheated death, no one would have been surprised if he never climbed through the window of a race car again.

He did, of course.

Unless they have debilitating injuries, they always do.

There is no palpable fear.

“It was terrible, but yet I was OK,” Waltrip says. “I was fine. So that gives you the mental leg up to go do it again. You forget immediately. As soon as you’re back in the car, you’re on it. I don’t remember having any reservations about doing what I do. I just went and did it.”

One of the most amazing things about race-car drivers – particularly to people outside the sport – is that, barring significant injury, there is little evidence that major accidents have any sort of extraordinary impact on their willingness and ability to go fast again. They’re racers. Therefore, they race. The first-turn wall be damned.

There is no better evidence of the phenomenon this season than Carl Edwards, who drove a car into the lower levels of the atmosphere at Talladega Superspeedway in April. Edwards was the focal point of one of the wildest finishes in the sport’s history as his Ford was catapulted into the air – and almost into the grandstand – near the start/finish line after contact with eventual winner Brad Keselowski and Ryan Newman.

Edwards could have been hurt badly – or worse. Instead, he climbed from his battered race car a few yards from the start/finish line and ran on foot down the track to “finish” the race.

In a moment when his life could have flashed before him as the latest in a long line of drivers to defy death or dismemberment, Edwards basically laughed in the face of the devil.

And he rode again, into the championship Chase and back to Talladega this week. Back to the future.

Edwards is one of the latest examples of the racer who drives beyond the ragged edge, isn’t cut by it and runs just as fast into the next turn.

How does this happen? Aren’t drivers scared – or at least impacted mentally – by such things? And, if not, why the heck not?

“Drivers look at it differently from the average guy,” says Richard Petty, whose wrecks – and injuries – over a long driving career could make up a Greatest Hits collection. “The deal is the challenge of all of it, not the effects. I think most drivers aren’t affected by stuff like that. I know maybe two or three that have been. Some didn’t get over it, others it took some time, but most just move on. Most don’t blink an eye. It’s just part of the territory. You just go on with it.”

Edwards said his spectacular Talladega wreck was over for him as soon as he collected his senses inside the car and realized he was OK.

“It’s funny, you forget about those wrecks that quick and then you go do the same stupid stuff again and again – at least I do,” he says. “So, I’d say that it’s far from my mind. One of the things that attracted me to racing so much was that the first time I drove a race car it scared the hell out of me. I was like, ‘Man, that’s pretty exciting.’ Now, I don’t get that feeling. It’s just the competition, and the fear is losing. That’s the only real fear out there – making a mistake that costs you a position or the race.

“You have to learn from the wrecks and react right up to the point where you slow down the race car. You can’t do that. You can’t slow down or be less competitive. The fact is that you have to go back and race and do the best you can. Fortunately, it’s a lot safer than bullriding or motocross racing. You can walk away.”

Not everyone does walk away, of course, although there has not been a death in NASCAR’s top three series since Dale Earnhardt’s Daytona 500 crash in 2001.
Jeff Gordon has raced within the shadow of calamity, providing more proof that even NASCAR’s best drivers aren’t immune to the vagaries of the ragged edge. His worst crash occurred in 2006 near the end of a race at Pocono, when the brakes in his Chevrolet failed approaching Turn 1. The Pocono front straight produces some of the fastest speeds in racing, so Gordon, in the startling instant before impact, knew this one would be a doozy.

“That was probably the scariest one to me,” Gordon says. “It definitely rung my bell really good. My first instinct was to put it in first gear to slow it down, maybe spin it around. I hit really hard. I was really loopy. But, from the mental impact, it was no big deal. What crossed my mind was, ‘What can we do to try to help in every one of those crashes?’ Obviously, we have a different brake package now at Pocono.”

That’s the approach after a bad wreck, Gordon said. The emphasis is not so much on what happened or the fear of it happening again but on what the driver and team can do to lessen the chances of a repeat.

“It’s like everything – a win or a wreck,” he says. “It’s a learning process that you try to put in your memory bank and say, ‘OK, how can I do it better next time?’ If you had to go right back out there the next lap and do it again, then, yeah, you’re probably going to be a little gun-shy. But you make laps, you race for several weeks and your instincts are back as a race-car driver.”

For Waltrip, there was never any question about racing again after the sensational Bristol crash. His thinking was along the lines of, “Hey, I survived that one. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“I just thought I could never have a wreck like that again,” Waltrip says. “And I haven’t. I just said to the Lord that he didn’t want me to be famous for having the worst wreck ever and that be the end of it. I was able to get through that somehow and go on to win races and have a lot of fun over the years that followed that.”

In the tense months that followed Earnhardt’s death, a stunning loss that hit many drivers – and their families – very hard, no one was more proactive about safety than Jeff Burton. The reality, Burton says, is that there will be wrecks and some of them will be bad, but successful drivers still will drive to the edge of the precipice and sometimes beyond.

“I don’t want to be in a wreck, I’m not excited about being in a wreck, but at the same time, I know I’m going to be in a wreck,” Burton says. “It’s just part of the deal. I want to try to learn from it and not ignore it. I want to look at all the stuff that happened prior to the wreck, during the wreck and after the wreck and how could I have done something better because I think that’s how I get from being in the wreck again. If I do get in a wreck again, that is how I learn and not get injured.”

Bobby Labonte, who has wrestled with fire (Chicagoland Speedway) and broken bones (Darlington Raceway) in spectacular accidents, said the secret, after being prepared safety-wise inside the car, is simply “to get back on the horse.”

“You don’t have to do this, but you want to,” he says. “And if you want to do this, you don’t let stuff like that bother you. You just block it out of your mind.

“I think the scariest thing for me was the fire at Chicago a few years back [in 2003] because, with a fire, it’s hard to run from that. It was blazing too much. When you’re in it and you can’t get out and it’s coming to you, that’s the worst thing. But I would say it was out of my head before I got back in a car again. When you get in the car, you don’t sit there and think about it.

“I’ve had a throttle hang in practice and hit the wall head-on at Darlington. We got the other car off the truck and went again. That helped. It’s what you do.”

That attitude permeates the top levels of racing, even down to fresh, new faces such as 19-year-old Joey Logano, who had his “big wreck” very early in his career. He took a wild, flipping ride at Dover International Speedway Sept. 27, escaped injury and quickly declared himself ready to race as hard as ever despite the battering.

No retreat, no surrender.

“If anything, it’s going to give you more confidence because you can go through that and come out of it fine,” he says.

Perhaps to prove his point, only six days after his rolling ride at Dover, Logano made some fierce moves to win a Nationwide race at Kansas Speedway.

Although Logano’s Dover wreck looked horrific, the barrel-roll sort of accident is almost never as bad in a real sense as those that involve a car meeting a wall at full force. As many drivers have said, it’s not the speed that hurts, it’s the sudden stop.

Nationwide Series veteran Jason Keller experienced that part of racing to a violent degree in September 2003 when he absorbed one of the hardest hits ever recorded by the “black box” in-car technology NASCAR uses to measure the impact of accidents. Keller was involved in a late-race accident with Shane Hmiel at Richmond International Raceway, and his car slammed with brutal force into the outside wall. Keller, normally one of NASCAR’s calmest racers, was exceptionally mad at Hmiel (who later would be suspended by NASCAR for failing a drug test) but was not injured.

Ironically, in the spring of that year, Keller had been called on to fill in for Cup driver Jerry Nadeau on that same track after a similar crash at Richmond critically injured Nadeau and ended his career. Before the September racing weekend, RIR installed SAFER barriers, a change that probably made Keller’s crash much less threatening.

Still, it was a monster hit, and Keller said it didn’t escape his mind for a while.

“It takes you a little while to get back into the rhythm,” Keller says. “The one good thing is that we didn’t have to go back to Richmond for a while, so it wasn’t like I had to saddle up and go down the back straightaway again 30 minutes later, or even the next day. By the time you get back to that track, I won’t say you’ve forgotten about it, but it’s not in the front of your mind.

“The thing you think about later is, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t be running door-to-door with this guy.’ I don’t think you pull the reins back as much as it makes you think about who you’re racing around.”

Three-time champion Jimmie Johnson survived a wicked crash in 2000 in a Busch (now Nationwide) Series race at Watkins Glen. His brakes failed and his car roared at near-full speed across grass and dirt off the race course before hitting Styrofoam barriers in front of the wall with violent force. Johnson was not injured, but the nature of the crash got his attention.

“It seemed like 20 minutes from when the brakes went out until I hit the wall, but it was only a few seconds,” he says. “There was nothing I could do. I was going 150 miles an hour on a downhill slope into a banked corner with no brakes. I didn’t know what was on the other side. I knew there were some tires there eventually [in front of the wall]. It got really quiet. I got really calm. Once I realized I couldn’t do anything, I kind of slumped over. It was the best thing I could do. It was an eerie, eerie feeling. I just kind of went numb and limp.

“I think as time goes on you become more and more immune to it as you go through big wrecks. You build – I don’t know if it’s a false sense of security because it’s still a dangerous sport – but you build a sense of security and understanding of situations and get better with it.”

And then you drive on.