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NASCAR News | April 10, 2010
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Giving up your car is the most painful part of getting hurt
By David Caraviello
April 10, 2010
Jeff Burton doesn’t remember the race, he doesn’t remember the year. All he remembers is that he had to get out of the car.
“I just couldn’t do it,” the Cup Series driver said Friday at Phoenix International Raceway. “I had severe vertigo, and I just couldn’t drive. I could do it for a little while, but over a period of time, it just got worse and worse and worse. I finally just had to get out.”
For a competitor on NASCAR’s premier series, there are few decisions more difficult. Over the course of the sport’s history, drivers have raced in tremendous discomfort, and gone to sometimes ridiculous extremes to do so—most famously Ricky Rudd, who duct-taped his swollen eyes open at Daytona in 1984 after a rolling crash in a preliminary event left him with facial injuries and a concussion. The ability to play with pain is a prerequisite of the profession, especially under a points system that demands title contenders start every race, and in a garage area where machismo is as omnipresent as the smell of tire rubber.
There’s Mark Martin, having to be lifted into his car and competing with a broken wrist, broken kneecap and a broken rib after a 1999 crash at Daytona. There’s David Reutimann, sick with the flu, vomiting into plastic bags last year at Charlotte. There’s Carl Edwards, breaking his foot while chasing a Frisbee last season and competing days later at Atlanta with orthotics in his shoe. There’s Richard Petty, who broke his neck in a crash at Pocono in 1980, kept it to himself, and kept on racing.
And now there’s Denny Hamlin, back at the race track just more than a week removed from having the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee surgically repaired. In January, he tore it playing basketball. The plan was to compete all season on the loose hinge and have it fixed in the winter. Then he tore his meniscus, a piece of cartilage that provides support to the knee. The plan was revised, and Hamlin went under the knife March 31. So there he was Friday at Phoenix, limping and refusing to use crutches, gritting his teeth through obvious pain, twisting himself into his race car as if his left leg were made of unbendable steel. He made about 70 laps in practice, and will start Saturday’s race.
How far can he go? The pain, perhaps mitigated somewhat by a plan to extract fluid and remove stitches on Saturday morning, will determine that. If it gets too bad, Casey Mears will be on standby, and Hamlin will have to do the one thing drivers dread most—step out of the vehicle, and turn the race car, his race car, over to someone else.
“I can only imagine what it would be like to watch your race car on track and you not be in it during a race,” Jimmie Johnson said. “It’s one thing if it’s a teammate at a test, it’s even hard to see that. It’s got to be the most difficult thing to watch. I think that’s a large part of it. Even though you’re injured and you probably can’t do your job as well as you should, or as well as you could if you weren’t injured, you just don’t want to see someone else in your car. That’s the bottom line.”
Sometimes, though, there’s no other choice but to step out. Even the toughest hombre in NASCAR, Dale Earnhardt, did just that after breaking his sternum, shoulder blade, and collarbone in a crash at Talladega in 1996. One week later at Indianapolis, he handed his iconic No. 3 car—as closely identified with the Intimidator as his bushy mustache or dark sunglasses—to Mike Skinner on the first pit stop. He called it the toughest thing he’d ever done.
“The majority of the time, you are able to do it, you are able to [race hurt],” Jeff Burton said. “There are a few times, we saw with Kyle Busch last year where he was really ill, and he just couldn’t do it. It’s a tough decision, and you tend to do it a lot of times when you probably shouldn’t from a performance standpoint. Someone who is healthier could perform better. But being the guy who’s racing for points and being the guy whose name is on the roof of the car, you want to finish it out. Even if you’re not 100 percent, you want to finish it out. Sometimes it’s a character-builder. You’re trying to learn something about yourself along the way.”
Athletes in all sports occasionally hide or soft-pedal injuries, mostly because they don’t want to show any sign of weakness, sometimes because they don’t want to lose their job to a healthier rival. Burton has driven with a broken leg, broken rib, even a broken back one time when he was contending for a championship on a local level. “A lot of times the doctors know about it, and no one else will,” he said. “We’ve all been in that situation. We’ve all had to make that decision.”
Tony Stewart had to make it in 2006, when he broke his shoulder blade in a crash at Charlotte. His next race was at the physically punishing 1-mile Dover track. He made it 38 laps before handing his No. 20 car to Ricky Rudd.
“It took a lot to get me out of cars,” Stewart said. “If I get out, or if somebody gets out of race cars, you know they’re in a lot of pain, or don’t feel well. At least my mindset is, if I’m not able to focus on what I’m doing, I’m not doing my best for the team, and it’s best to get somebody else in who can focus. No driver wants to get out of a race car, but at the same time, this is a sport where we play hurt, we play sick, we don’t have substitutions.”
Dale Earnhardt Jr. knows that first-hand. During a NASCAR off weekend in 2004 he was practicing a Corvette for a sports-car event at Infineon Raceway when the vehicle slid off course, hit a concrete barrier, and burst into flames. Earnhardt suffered second- and third-degree burns on his neck, chin, and legs, injuries that would require care and treatment for much of the season. The next week at New Hampshire, he let then-Busch Series driver Martin Truex Jr. qualify his No. 8 car, and take over early in the race. A week later at Pocono, he started and handed the steering wheel to John Andretti.
For Earnhardt Jr., those were not tough calls. Pride never affected his decision-making. Pain did.
“My burns were bothering me pretty bad, and I didn’t want to be in the car anymore,” he recalled Friday. “It felt weird, you know, watching your car run around. We were having such a miserable day [at New Hampshire] anyways. It would really bother you if you knew you had a good car. Denny will have a good car, and those are tougher to hand over.”
Hamlin’s car was good enough to lead the weekend’s first practice session, although he slipped to 24th in qualifying. He sounded like someone struggling with the reality of his sudden limitations. “I’ll just do whatever I can, and that’s all I can do,” he said.
And if that involves turning his No. 11 car over to Mears? That might prove even more painful than the knee injury. NASCAR is a tough sport where drivers are sometimes expected to compete under very tough conditions. But as others before Hamlin have discovered, even tough guys have their limits
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