Originally published in November 2008

Three-Part Series Tells the Behind the Scenes Stories of Drag Racers Facing Insurmountable Comeback Odds …


For every story of unprecedented courage told here on the pages of CompetitionPlus.com, there are millions of others that will go untold.

In the days to come, CompetitionPlus.com will bring you five stories of incredible bravery, dedication and determination. Stories of people who did not let accident or illness end their dreams of racing.

The first lady of drag racing Shirley Muldowney, fourteen-time world champion John Force, second-generation Top Fuel driver Brandon Bernstein and cancer survivors Jack Beckman and Steve Torrence have all shared with CompetitionPlus.com their innermost struggles and fears coupled with undying determination to live.

Their stories could easily appear on Real TV’s I Survived series.

Here’s a sampling:

One came to a stop in high grass, leaving safety crews wondering where the driver was amongst the plane crash-style setting.

Another didn’t know what had happened as safety crews cut the top of the roll cage from his mangled chassis. His only thought was, “Did I win the round?”

A rookie suffered excruciating pain as he waited for safety crews to arrive, but nowhere close to the pain he would have endured had fireworks resting in his crotch detonated.

Then there were the cancer survivors. One was 17, with his whole life ahead of him. Another had just won a world championship title only to face another race with a dangerous disease with serious mortality implications.
These are their stories.

SHIRLEY MULDOWNEY - A MANGLED BODY

As Shirley Muldowney remembers it, the NHRA Safety Safari couldn’t find her after a high-speed crash at Sanair International Raceway. The remnants of her mangled dragster frame had come to a stop in a drainage ditch filled with waist-high grass.

Muldowney’s crash was the direct result of a failed left front tire during the 1984 NHRA Le Grandnationals in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

There were admitted problems with the tire combination of this era and clearly drag racing had reached a period and time when the speeds the dragsters were reaching had far exceeded the abilities of the tires.

On the fateful run, the wheel/tire (similarly akin to an Avon motorcycle wheel/tire) showed no sign of defect after the burnout. None that is, which the crew would have deemed serious enough to justify shutting off the car prior to the crash.

On this run, which came during the last qualifying session for the event, the apparently faulty tire disintegrated at the 1,000-foot mark when the tube came out of the tire and wrapped itself around the steering arm. Ironically, the tube never split, instead it wound tightly, similar to a rubber band, until the front-end of the dragster snapped.

Muldowney remembers at the time thinking, “Do I go for the chutes? Do I go for the chutes?”

She did go for the chutes and then brought her hand back to the wheel.

The front end quickly became so twisted that the force ripped the steering wheel from her hands and turned the car abruptly left.

Muldowney was injured before the car impacted anything, the freely spinning steering unit had ripped her thumb from her hand.

There was no guardrail at Sanair for that portion of the track, and at 250 miles per hour the out of control dragster left the racing surface. Muldowney remembered the dragster actually skimmed a gulley filled with muck and mud before plowing through an embankment with the ferocity of a high-speed bulldozer.

The car disintegrated.

SHIRLEY'S CRASH ON YOUTUBE

The motor was hurled 300 feet from the wreckage. Muldowney remained with the cage portion of the car which was hurled just as far in the opposite direction.

The car was gone from the top of Muldowney’s hip forward leaving her lower extremities exposed to danger.

As she laid there on her side, Muldowney regained consciousness just as the safety crew arrived.

“There was stuff everywhere, they came down there looking for some resemblance of a race car,” Muldowney explained. “There simply wasn’t anything left. One of the safety guys and his name escapes me at this time, asked where I was and couldn’t find me.”

Muldowney was a mere five feet away.

Pictures of the accident clearly show Muldowney’s car in flight, engine flying through the air and her legs exposed. The eerie part of the photos, at one point the engine floated about ten feet above Muldowney in the cage.

The rescue team, led by then senior NHRA EMT Ronnie Davis, needed roughly 45 minutes to stabilize the severely injured Muldowney.

The scene was reminiscent of a gruesome horror movie.

Muldowney was missing a foot and her deep wounds were full of grass, mud, oil and stone.

“They had a real bad time on their hands,” Muldowney recalled. “I started to feel pain as they worked.”

The injury listing resembled that of a person who should have never walked again, yet alone drive a race car.

Muldowney’s injuries included a broken pelvis, her right leg had two compound fractures (with bones exposed), the left knee was backwards, left foot severed (with tendons), completely dislocated left thumb and severed right thumb.

Davis, the NHRA EMT, later said he held himself together emotionally just long enough to get back to his hotel, where he broke down and cried for almost an hour. He was pretty sure he’d seen Muldowney drive her last quarter mile.

JOHN FORCE - A FORCE OF DETERMINATION

If there was one inch left in a race track and John Force was behind in a race, he’d fight tooth and nail down to that last inch.

He’d fistfight you for it if necessary.

This race, in the quarter-finals of the 2007 NHRA Fallnationals in Dallas, Tex., was for more than just to remain in world championship contention. It was for the memory of Eric Medlen, his fellow driver who had lost his life in a testing accident earlier in the year.

Force gained the win-light but just as he’d beaten Kenny Bernstein, the lights went out on a brightly sunny September afternoon.

When the ten-time Funny Car world champion regained consciousness, he noted the Safety Safari crew removing the roll cage on his severely damaged chassis.

Force believes the harmonics resonating through the chassis is what rendered him unconscious.

To this date, no definitive cause for Force’s crash has been publicly given.

Those on the inside suggest the wreck occurred when heat-treated tubing in the chassis separated leading to a punctured tire.

The crash bore an eerie resemblance to the one which had killed Medlen just months earlier.

When the tire exploded and the chassis separated, a deployed parachute pulled the damaged frame apart taking Force and the rear axle assembly, cage and body in one direction and leaving the front half to roll away in another.

Safety workers converged on the remnants of the race car which had collided with Bernstein, only to realize Force was not there.

YOUTUBE VIDEO - JOHN'S CRASH

He was hundreds of feet up track strapped into his chassis.

Certainly, the vibrations that resonated throughout the chassis could have scrambled Force’s brain like an egg.

Force credits God and the knowledge extracted from Medlen’s accident for his saving grace.

“Because of Eric Medlen I'm alive,” Force said. “His death showed us how to build a roll cage with padding that will take not just multiple hits but could take 100 hits and it recovers. I was knocked out but I had no head injuries. It may have been the harmonics but I lost the memory of that point in time. I don't remember (anything) until sitting in the car with them cutting the roll cage off. I got some flashbacks of Kenny and me running into each other. What took place is that the car was broken up just like Eric’s except I put out the parachutes. When the parachutes came out the heavy end of the car was me and it sucked to one end so it broke its weakest link.”

Force’s injuries were serious to the point that even though he vowed to race again, unless he committed to an all out physical therapy regimen, he would barely walk again, yet alone drive.

Force sustained a broken left ankle and severe abrasion on his right knee. Force's left wrist also was dislocated and broken and he sustained some severe abrasions and slight fractures on a number of fingers on his right hand. The ends of Force's fingers were ground down as if they had been put into a grinder and sanded down.

As only he could do, Force handled being in an accident until he actually saw how badly he hurt.

“I was fine until they cut open my firesuit and I saw my foot laid over backwards,” Force said. “Then they cut up my arms and I could see my hand laid over backwards too. There were bones sticking out of my foot. I could hear other people and they were more emotional than me.”

Among those who watched as the EMTs worked on him were Force’s daughter Ashley, wife Laurie and son-in-law Robert Hight.

“I think I was in shock,” Force recalled. “I saw it, but I wasn’t like “Oh my God.

“I saw a foot of my right leg was gashed open. It was an ugly day.”


BRANDON BERNSTEIN - A ROOKIE DECISION, A ROOKIE MISTAKE

Brandon Bernstein just wanted to win.

The rookie Top Fuel driver was following in the footsteps of his father, the highly successful multi-time champion, Kenny Bernstein.

The younger Bernstein crashed in the first round of the NHRA Supernationals in Englishtown, N.J., against John Smith. Ironically, his crash came just two pairs after Darrell Russell had defeated Shirley Muldowney, one driver who lost his life a year later and another who suffered a potentially crippling accident nearly a decade earlier.

Unlike other drivers, Bernstein remembers the entire episode.

“It’s kind of funny, people ask me that a lot,” Bernstein recalled. “But I remember everything that happened. I remember pedaling the car trying to keep it together. I remember at one point knowing I was out of control and didn’t have any control over the car. I remember looking over at the wall and thinking this is going to hurt. Immediately when I hit it I felt the pain right away in my back, almost instantaneous. I just knew something was really bad. I remember everything about it, the noise, going over the wall, hitting the canisters that were for the fireworks. The weirdest part about it is I remember seeing one of those canisters come up and almost hit me in the helmet but it ended up hitting the roll cage. It actually landed in the cockpit with me; they found it when they were pulling me out of the car. I remember seeing all of that, that’s the weird part. I was never knocked unconscious.”

Bernstein’s dragster smoked the tires just past the Christmas tree and the driver, with just eight races under his belt in a Top Fueler, began to pedal the throttle in an attempt to recover from the loss of traction. Despite his efforts, the dragster turned left into the retaining wall and the combination of an open throttle and a banked retaining wall catapulted him on top of the wall briefly before he crashed into the adjacent grassy photographer area.

 
YOUTUBE.COM - BRANDON'S CRASH

The dragster dug through the grass and dirt before coming to a rest. A stunned Bernstein surveyed the damage at hand.

The elder Bernstein’s view was one of horrific proportions and when the shock of the initial impact wore off, the pain his son was suffering became obvious.

“He knew I was in pain because of the way my eyes looked; I couldn’t breathe because it hurt so badly and where the fracture was it didn’t make breathing easy. He asked me to move my fingers, and I did. Then he asked me to move my toes and I did; I said I can feel that. He said in one instant 'You’re going to be alright.'

“That could’ve been the worst thing for me or the best thing for me because I could do that. If I couldn’t have done that it would’ve been devastating to know that I couldn’t move my toes. It was actually a relief to know that I could, it really calmed me down and helped me through it. Then they started just slowly getting me out of there.”

Bernstein didn’t realize just how badly he was injured until he returned to California and visited spine specialist Dr. Watkins and learned the full extent of the injury through an MRI.

“My dad and I just looked at each other and couldn't believe it,” Bernstein said in an interview published by National DRAGSTER. “I was extremely lucky because the fracture was laying right on the spinal cord. I easily could have been paralyzed. That was a huge eye-opener.

“At that point, I became thankful for what I did have, that I was up and walking and that I would be able to race again. It sucked that it was the end of my season, but I turned it around and became very thankful and started planning for 2004.”



TOMORROW: COMING BACK, PT. 2 – THE FIGHT WITH CANCER
THURSDAY: COMING BACK, PT. 3 – THE PAINFUL REHAB