Racing to the Finish Read online

  What didn’t change was the racers’ mentality of toughing it out and walking it off. It was still considered the worst thing for a driver to be perceived in the garage as damaged goods. That’s why, in 2002, I chose to tell no one about what had happened to me in the season’s tenth race, a 500-miler at the big, sweeping two-mile California Speedway in Fontana, California, just one week after I had taken my second consecutive win at Talladega.

  Anyone watching that day knew that I had taken a huge shot late in the race. Kevin Harvick, driving my father’s old ride, was cutting down toward the entrance to pit road and stuffed the nose of his Chevy into the passenger’s side door of mine. I got turned toward the Turn 4 wall and slid into it so hard that it bent the entire left front of the car, so deep it looked like that whole corner had been sawed off. The hood was bowed to the point that it stuck several feet up into the air. There’s no doubt that the newly redesigned interior of the car, the new seat, and the head and neck restraint I was wearing—all implemented after my father’s death—kept me from getting hurt way worse than I was. But my head was ringing, a dull sensation inside my skull. The breath had been knocked out of me, my body was sore, and I thought I might’ve been hurt bad.

  If you look at the video now, you can see plain as day that right there, just seconds after the crash, I was already worried about looking like I was hurt. I didn’t want anyone to see if I was, so I basically ran past the medical team and jumped into the ambulance. On the telecast, analyst Darrell Waltrip said a couple of times that he thought I’d just had the breath knocked out of me. That was good. That’s what I wanted people to think. But it was wrong. I had suffered a concussion. Unlike Daytona in 1998, I knew this one was no joke. But I kept it to myself, even when the symptoms didn’t subside over the next few weeks.

  I was twenty-seven and a pretty hard partier in those days, so I think most people figured that if I was dragging or looking tired, I’d been up drinking beers all night. A lot of times, I probably had, but not now. I just felt like I had. For at least a month I felt like I’d had a couple of beers all the time, morning, noon, night, and even when I was behind the wheel of my racecar. During that stretch, we ran terrible. In fact, we ran awful all summer long. Meanwhile, I managed to keep my secret all the way until the end of September. By then I was feeling fine and we were running near the front again, so in an interview leading up to the race at the year-old Kansas Speedway, I confessed that I had run several races during spring and summer while I was—and this is exactly how I put it—“feeling a little loopy.”

  NASCAR was not happy about that confession. It dominated the headlines all weekend. But I certainly wasn’t alone. Other drivers and former drivers backed me up by adding their own stories of hiding concussions over the years. The most notable was Dale Jarrett, a series champion, future NASCAR Hall of Famer, and someone whose opinion has always been deeply respected throughout the sport. He admitted that he had no recollection of the inaugural Kansas Speedway event one year earlier, thanks to a concussion suffered in the closing laps of the race. None. His memory had been erased to the point that he said when he came back for that 2002 race people had to show him where the garage and driver motorcoach lot were. It was like he’d never been there before.

  In the middle of all that public confessing, NASCAR announced changes to how drivers would be evaluated after hard hits like mine. Until then, if the doctor who did the initial, quick examination in the infield care center cleared that driver to leave without admitting him to a hospital, then NASCAR assumed that meant he was good to go and cleared to drive, physically and mentally. Those infield checkups were the same as they’d basically always been: pretty simple. Everyone has fibbed to their doctor from time to time during a routine physical, right? He says, “How have you been feeling?” and we say, “Oh, I’m fine,” just to get out of there and go home. Racecar drivers didn’t just do that from time to time. They did that all the time. Most probably still do. Why? I said it to those reporters in 2002 and it’s still true: I didn’t want to tell anyone how bad I’d felt until after I got better and I started running better because I didn’t want anyone to think I was broken, that I was messed up.

  I had seen drivers get hurt before, and I had heard how people talked about them behind their backs. I love the people in the NASCAR garage and I know a lot of them love me, but they will cut you from the herd if they think you’re going to slow them down. It had just happened with my teammate Steve Park the year before. He suffered a head injury in a freak accident at Darlington Raceway and had worked his butt off to come back. Yet when he didn’t immediately start running up front like he was doing before the crash, all I heard was, “Well, there you go. Steve was awesome, but you know what? He’ll never be the same again.”

  There was no way I was putting myself in that situation. I had worked so hard to prove I belonged at NASCAR’s highest level because of my ability, not just because of my name. There was no way I was going to start back at zero with everyone. In my mind, if I had fessed up about my concussion that summer, when we were running twenty-to-thirty-something-place every weekend, then my career and my image might not ever recover. “Ol’ Junior, he’s finished. Just like Steve Park. He’ll never be the same again.” That’s why I waited. It’s no coincidence that I chose to finally admit it all after we’d picked up a few top-ten finishes over the month and a half leading into that Kansas race.

  The morning of that race, NASCAR announced on national television that they were changing their policies and would now be watching drivers much more closely during those post-crash exams. If the infield doctor had even the smallest bit of worry that there might have been a concussion, then he was supposed to immediately call for further scans and tests.

  Every race day begins with what we call a drivers’ meeting, when every driver, crew chief, team owner, and NASCAR official goes over the ground rules for that day’s event. It’s part of our routine. But when this meeting ended and I went to leave like I always did, NASCAR president Mike Helton told me to sit back down. I’ve known Mike nearly my whole life. He’s one of my father figures. In that moment he talked to me like a father figure, in his always-calm, sorta-quiet but still sorta-scary tone of his. He told me he wasn’t happy. He told me about the policy changes. And he told me to never do that again, racing when I didn’t feel right or kind of shrug it off publicly like I had that week. This was serious business, and he wanted me to treat it as such.

  So what did I do? I joked about it on national television. An hour later, during the pre-race TV coverage, NBC Sports ran a whole segment on the mess, showing my California crash and interviewing Mike Helton about how mad he was. It even included an interview with driver Jeff Burton, now my coworker at NBC, in which he admitted how easy it was for drivers to fake their way through post-crash exams and said that everyone did it. Then they came to me for a live interview.

  “Dale, do you feel like you put your fellow competitors in any danger by racing with a concussion after your wreck at California?”

  “Nah, not really. I mean, even at 80 percent I’m still better than probably half those guys out there . . .”

  I was joking. I guess I was trying to sound like my dad. Then I went to explain myself.

  “I thought about that, but it was a situation where I made my own decision. I would’ve accepted the repercussions from that no matter what they were . . .” I admitted that I handled it wrong, that I’d hurt the trust between myself and NASCAR a little, and said that I felt like being out on the track was the best way for me to evaluate exactly how bad of shape I was really in. I told everyone that I’d kept to myself because I didn’t want to cause any alarm, because, hey, it wasn’t as serious as everyone was making it out to be.

  But what was my biggest regret at the time, so much so I said it twice? That the concussion had been just enough to keep us from competing for the Winston Cup championship at year’s end.

  Today, when I go back and watch that interview, I don�
��t laugh at that 80 percent comment like I used to. When I watch that roll cage–denting 1998 Daytona 300 wreck on YouTube, I don’t laugh at that anymore either. I have the same feeling whenever I watch other old races and see crashes like the one at Daytona in ’84 that caused Ricky Rudd to have to tape his eyelids open. I used to watch that stuff and see pure awesomeness. Action and danger and thrills and a fearless racer doing his thing.

  You know what I see now? I see Ricky Rudd’s head in the car. I see how much it travels around in the cockpit, being thrown around and bouncing off of stuff. I think about those taped-open eyelids and, yeah, it’s a cool story to tell, but it was probably just scratching the surface of what all had actually happened to Ricky inside his head . . . or to my father when he had a hard crash . . . or to me, when I see myself so desperate to get into that ambulance at Fontana before anyone could judge me . . . or to any driver who came up racing in the world that we all did.

  I told you, I love racing. That will never change. But the way I look at racing has changed. Really, the way I look at the whole world has changed. Why? What happened to make me feel that way? It all goes back to what was supposed to be a run-of-the-mill Wednesday afternoon in Kansas City, back at the same track where ten years earlier I’d caused such a controversy.

  CHAPTER 2

  INTO THE FOG

  Wednesday, August 29, 2012

  Kansas Speedway

  I’ve never been a big fan of tire tests. You can probably attribute that to my DNA. My father was notorious for finding substitute drivers to sit in for him during tests. In racing, midweek test sessions are a necessary evil. We run lap after lap as fast as we can go, finding the limits of what will and won’t work on a racecar when we come back to that track with trophies on the line. Those test laps are when crew chiefs, engineers, auto manufacturers, tire makers, even the folks who run the racetracks all gather data and information to see what works and what doesn’t. That goes for drivers, too, but really our job is to run the car as hard as it will go, give them as much data as possible, and then let the others take that information and see what they can do with it.

  But it can get boring—a day of running laps all by yourself, stopping only to pull into the garage and sit there while the engineers run their tests. If you follow me on social media, then you know I’m kind of addicted to my phone. On these days I keep it in the car to give me something to do between runs. I’m always checking social media, texting Amy, whatever.

  This particular Wednesday was for me the tensest kind of test—a tire test. Goodyear is NASCAR’s exclusive tire supplier, and they provide different types of tires to teams depending on what type of track we’re running, whether it’s a big superspeedway like Daytona and Talladega, a short track like Richmond and Martinsville, or one of our bread-and-butter intermediate tracks, like the one-and-a-half-mile Kansas Speedway. When Goodyear has a tire compound they feel they need to run through its paces or if there’s been a significant change to a racetrack and they want to make sure they are ready for it, then they will book a test session with a team or several teams to serve as their guinea pigs for the day.

  In this case they needed to take a look at both the tire and the track. They had a tire that had been having some issues on intermediate tracks, and the place where we were on this day, Kansas Speedway, had just been repaved. When I say a tire test is tense, it’s because of what the mission of that test really is. If they ask you to do it, you always say yes because it’s good for any race team to get in any extra practice laps whenever they can. But it’s tense because what Goodyear really wants to see is where the limit is, how far their tire can go. The trick for the driver is to find that edge and ride right on it without pushing too far and going over it.

  Whenever a racetrack gets new blacktop it is super fast. We’d been at Kansas Speedway for two days, and we were flying around the track. There were a handful of cars there, and we were all quick, but I was the fastest car there, and everyone knew it.

  It wasn’t just this test. We had been fast all season long. I was in my second season with Steve Letarte as my crew chief, and we were in the groove, man. We started the year finishing second in the Daytona 500 and had never slowed down. We won at Michigan on June 17, snapping a nearly four-year losing streak, and spent all summer ranked either first or second in the championship standings. This was the best I had raced and the best I had felt in a long time.

  I was starting the final lap of a 25-lap run and had really picked up the pace. I was coming down the frontstretch, and I was in the gas, big time. I had just topped out at 205 mph as the car entered the bottom of Turn 1. Just as I lifted out of the gas at the entrance of the turn, my right front tire popped. Just, BOOM. A tremendous amount of heat had built up within the tread pattern of the tire as it grabbed that new asphalt. The joint where the sidewall of the tire meets the tread had gotten to the point where it just couldn’t take the heat any longer. I mean, it just exploded. A whole chunk of the sidewall, big as a couple of fists, blew off.

  With nothing to hold the leading edge of the car to the racetrack, there was no way for me to steer it. My Chevy took a hard righthand turn and shot directly up the 17-degree banking, like a ramp, into the outside retaining wall. I was traveling at about 185 mph when I hit that wall.

  It was a nightmare blast of a hit. I’ve raced from the time I was a teenager, into nearly my mid-forties, and nothing has ever come anywhere close to how nasty that hit was. NASCAR installs Incident Data Recorders—or, as we call them, “black boxes”—that are similar to the crash data recorders that are used in airplanes. They can measure the acceleration and deceleration of our racecars 10,000 times per second. That information is used to figure out how much force was exerted during a crash, measured in Gs. They were mandated in 2002, another part of all the safety innovations that took place after my dad’s death the year before. Today’s more advanced measurements are even better (and the black boxes are actually blue now). As digital technology has improved, so has the ability to record and gather data.

  My hit at Kansas registered at 40 Gs. That’s a lot. Anything over 25 or 30 is considered big, and this was way over that. Honestly, it felt like more.

  The impact was so loud that my friend and fellow racer Brad Keselowski, who was also participating in the tire test, said he heard the impact in the garage, nearly half a mile away. It was so violent that Steve Letarte, who saw it from the roof of our team’s transporter truck, didn’t even wait for the rescue crew to get out there to me, stunned and trying to climb out of my destroyed car. Stevie immediately scrambled down off the hauler, ran to his rental car, and drove all the way out into the turn himself to check on me.

  Brad did the same. When Brad heard what he said “sounded like a plane crash,” he ran to where he could see the turn where I’d hit. What he saw was the tell-tale black marks on the asphalt that traced my path from the spot where the tire had blown to where my car was now, still stuck in the fence at the top of the banking. That’s what worried Brad: my car hadn’t bounced off the wall and slid back down the banking but was still jammed up there in the steel and foam of the “soft wall” barrier. The nose of my Chevy was stuck in there like a dart. It also bothered him that he kept watching for several minutes and a safety crew had yet to arrive, so, like Steve, he jumped into his rental car and hustled out there.

  It looked bad. I knew it had been a vicious hit. But at the time I didn’t think anything was unusually wrong with me physically. Whenever you crash, you kind of do a personal systems check. Anything feel broken? Everything moving and working okay?

  I did that check and climbed out of the car. When Brad and Steve got to me, I was leaning up against the wall, still catching my breath. There was still no ambulance, only a tow truck, and it had arrived at the same time as Brad in his rental car. He gave me a lift back to the garage and asked me if I was okay. When I didn’t respond, he didn’t think much of it. We’re good friends. Brad used to drive for me and even used to live in
a house on my property. He’s always described me as “a man of few words.” So my giving him a couple of one-word answers to his questions about the crash and the tire failure—that was nothing out of the ordinary.

  When he dropped me off at our hauler in the garage, the team was already preparing to unload the backup car and get me back out there. I asked how long it would be before that car was ready. Just put a washcloth on it, right? Walk it off.

  But Steve said the car wouldn’t be ready. He’d made that decision the instant I hit the wall. We were done. There was no way he was going to put me back on the track in another car. He’d seen the hit. He’d seen me. He was just spooked enough that he was like, nope, our day is over.

  I felt like I was going to be sore but, other than that, okay. But standing there in the Kansas Speedway garage, one of my crew guys, Jason Burdett, who has also been a friend of mine forever, was staring at me, watching me, like he was doing a Dale Jr. systems check. I asked him what was up, and he said, “Something ain’t right with you. Just the way you’re looking. The way you’re looking at me right now, the way you’re looking around, you just look messed up. You look glassed over, weird looking.”

  I laughed it off, but now, a few minutes after the crash, I started to realize that Jason wasn’t wrong. Something wasn’t right.

  I went with the team to a barbecue joint across the street from the track. My plane had come to Kansas City from North Carolina with Amy and my buddy Sawmill Hoover onboard. As soon as we were done eating I was going to jet off with them to DC to see the Washington Redskins play a preseason game against Tampa Bay. But, like Jason, anyone who really knew me and was closely watching me knew something was wrong. Like Brad says, I’m kind of a quiet guy anyway, especially in groups, so it’s not unusual for me not to say a lot in a situation like that where a bunch of us are eating together. But this was different. Steve said later that he had immediately noticed I was even more reserved than usual.