On September 23, 2015, Lyle Barnett was 10 feet tall and bulletproof. At least, he thought so.
The next day he found out different.
Today, the three-time NHRA Pro Modified national event winner is fine not being ten feet tall and bulletproof. It took a horrific accident to teach him a lesson.
Barnett was involved in one of the worst fires ever experienced in a doorslammer and survived.
“The odds were definitely stacked against me,” Barnett said in a forthcoming documentary to be aired at CompetitionPlusTV. “It’s not something that 40-year-old Lyle probably would’ve survived. Fortunately, I was 24 years old and in pretty good health.”
Barnett, who in 2015 was a Drag Radial racer competing in the Radial vs. The World division at the No Mercy 6 event hosted by South Georgia Motorsports Park when a fuel injection failure engulfed his C-5 Corvette.
The intensity of the fire subjected Barnett to 28 seconds of direct exposure to the flames resulting in third-degree burns to 15 percent of his body.
“I burned for 28 seconds, and that doesn’t seem like a long time, but I was on fire all 28 of those seconds,” Barnett explained. “And there was a time, probably 20 seconds into that, that I knew for a fact I was dead. I’d accepted the fact that I was going to die in a race car. And it was just a matter of how long it would take for me to die.”
While his car burned, Barnett sought a way to escape the inferno. He opened the door, fell out of the car onto the asphalt, and didn’t even know if the car was still rolling. Luckily for him, it was already stopped.
“Laying on the track, it didn’t really look like it was that bad, according to others,” Barnett said. “About four hours later, I was fighting for my life in a life flight from Valdosta, Georgia, to Augusta.”
Barnett’s life was touch and go for a while.
“There was a time there where I wasn’t going to make it,” Barnett said. “There was a time there that I had a chance. There was a time there that I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life on vent. And then there was a time when they realized that miracles had happened in that hospital. And I went from near death to fully functioning and healthy lungs.”
His lung restoration was nothing short of a miracle. There are 40 divisions in the human lung, and 38 of Barnett’s were damaged.
“The next two months of my life are a blur for the most part,” Barnett said. “I endured over 20 surgeries over the course of my stay there. Most of them, obviously, being grafting surgeries.”
The only thing Barnett realized just as quickly as how painful his injuries were, was how supportive the drag racing community was around him.
“The support system that existed from the drag racing community never wavered,” Barnett said. “The prayers came in by the minute.”
Barnett credits the unending attention to detail of the doctors and medical staff at the JMS Burn Center in Augusta, Ga., for his rapid recovery.
“I consider them angelic,” Barnett said. “I tell them all the time that they are 100% the reason that medically I am here today. And the good Lord above had a huge hand in that as well.”
“I’m blessed just to be sitting here, honestly. The rest of this story has kind of written itself, and it’s been a hell of a ride so far.”
