Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 29, 1990 TAG: 9004290019
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RAY COX SPORTSWRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
On NASCAR tracks where an extended series of successfully executed left turns keeps a driver in contention for a checkered flag and a pile of cash, when somebody takes a hard right, it's very, very bad news.
Sometimes the poor car is torn to pieces.
These cars, however, are built very well. The bosses of NASCAR have decreed that they will be as safe as they possibly can be. Thus, many a driver has emerged from a confrontation with concrete with nothing more than a headache and a lousy disposition.
Sometimes, the driver isn't so lucky. Sometimes he gets banged up pretty thoroughly.
Sometimes, he ends up dead.
On a cool Saturday afternoon early this month during the Budweiser 250 Busch Grand National Race at Bristol International Raceway, a series of circumstances sent 26-year-old Michael Waltrip and his Kool-Aid Pontiac crashing into the wall coming out of Turn 2.
As luck would have it, Waltrip's ride hit at precisely the wrong place: a steel crossover gate at the entrance to the track.
The Pontiac, estimated to be traveling at between 85 and 100 mph, sliced into the gate in such a way that the steel gate simply surrendered, bending several feet. Left exposed was the edge of the concrete wall.
That bare edge drove into the front-right side of Waltrip's car like those gasoline-powered hydraulic wedges that split firewood. The car shattered like a crystal glass on a flagstone floor.
The right-front tire drove back through the vehicle with unimaginable force. Pieces of high-priced race car went everywhere. Debris and parts of the roll cage remained hanging on the fence. A wheel assembly and section of roll cage, blackened and smoldering like an overdone marshmallow, remained impaled on the knife edge of the wall.
What was left slid with eerie slowness down the steeply banked track, down to the entrance to the backside pits.
There it sat, quietly smoking.
It was the 170th lap. Yellow caution flags flew at once. The remaining cars proceeded around the track, most unaware of the gravity of what had happened.
Driver L.D. Ottinger, 51, of Newport, Tenn., who would go on to lead 104 of the last 105 laps and win the race, was one of the first drivers to come back around the .533-mile high-banked oval and see the destruction.
"It looked like an Indy-car wreck," he said. "I thought he was killed."
There were 34,200 paying customers, plus assorted drivers, pit workers, NASCAR officials and others there that day. Did they think that they had seen a good-looking young 6-foot-5, 220-pound bachelor with a future bright as his race car die suddenly and hideously?
There was nothing else to think.
But they were wrong. Michael Waltrip lived. He will be racing in the Hanes Activewear 500 today.
"The Good Lord certainly spared the boy's life," said Leroy Waltrip, Michael's father and the patriarch of the racing Waltrip clan of Owensboro, Ky. "There's no doubt about that."
The day hadn't been the easiest for Michael Waltrip, even before the wreck.
First, he started way back in the field. A cold rain had wiped out qualifying and the cars started the April 7 race in order of their Grand National points for the season. Waltrip took the green flag 28th in a field of 30 cars.
The car ran great. Waltrip methodically made his way through the traffic. Then, he had a few problems.
The most worrisome was his brush with Kyle Petty's Pontiac on the 164th lap. Adios. Spinout for Waltrip. Into the pits for four new tires. Back to the rear of the field.
Waltrip was so far back that he felt he had to hotfoot through the herd to get back in position to contend.
Entering the 170th lap, after a restart, he was in sixth place and on the lead lap.
Going around the first turn, he was immediately aware - as he had been the whole race - of the tricky conditions at that end of the track. Driving that day had been an adventure because the surface recently had been resealed and was dangerously slick.
Drivers went into the turn - so steep it makes a pedestrian dizzy in its more tranquil moments - very tenderly by the standards of a less-than-gentle sport. Most of them drove as if crossing the threshold of a sloped ice-skating rink.
Under these conditions, Waltrip had a problem. There were these cars in front of him . . .
"I was just trying to get past the slower cars," he said.
So was 30-year-old Robert Pressley, a second-generation driver from Asheville, N.C., whose Oldsmobile was just ahead of Waltrip's Pontiac.
"When we went into the first turn, Michael was right behind me," Pressley said. "Just as I went around the corner, I made a move to the outside to get around a slower car. Michael made the same move."
Said Waltrip, "I guess he didn't see me."
Waltrip's car glanced off Pressley's, went into the "marbles" - loose material at the top of the track - and slammed sideways into the gate, then into the wall.
"It was a one-in-a-billion shot and probably much higher than that," said Jerry Fleenor, the emergency services director at Bristol International. "In 30 years [the track opened in 1961], nothing like that has happened. A couple of inches either way, and it would have been completely different. We'll never see something like that again in our lifetimes . . .
"I hope."
Pressley was not immediately aware of what happened.
"When we got together, my car bobbled the slightest little bit," he said. "When I got on the backside straightaway, I looked in the mirror and saw that somebody had wrecked, but I thought it was somebody else [besides Waltrip]. When I decided to make the move up high, I never thought he'd try to make the same move because it was so slick in Turn 2. I thought he'd go down low to pass."
Photographs appeared to show that Waltrip had just enough time to apply the brakes before he crashed into the 12-inch thick wall.
"I didn't think it was that big a deal," he said. "It knocked the wind out of me. I couldn't get my breath and I lost consciousness for a little bit."
It was a big deal.
The car disintegrated on impact, breaking into three large pieces and a number of smaller ones. The engine went right and the driver's compartment and steering column went left.
Waltrip, still strapped in his seat and attached to the left side frame rail, was sitting on the track with no car around him.
"I've spent a lot of time looking at that car and gone over that film I don't know how many times and I don't understand how he got out of that," said Ronnie Silver, Waltrip's car builder for the Bahari Racing Busch Grand National team. "I've slowed the tape down and looked at it frame by frame.
"It looks like when he hit, the car came to a complete stop and the guts of the car never stopped moving."
The part of the car that Waltrip was in ended up about 20 feet from the wall, at the entrance to the backside pits.
When Pressley came back around the track and first saw the scene, he was horrified.
"It was one of the worst things I've ever seen," he said. "You see something like that and you think the guy's got to be be hurt bad and that's the best you can hope for."
Michael Waltrip's older brother, Darrell, the richest driver in the sport's history, was standing on the back of a truck in the infield.
Darrell was not running in the Grand National race and was just biding his time before the next day's Valleydale Meats 500 Winston Cup race. He was with crew chief Jeff Hammond and crew member Sandy Jones.
As was his custom, Darrell was watching his little brother.
"He'd just spun and I knew that he was going to be making a rather large charge to the front," Darrell said. "Then it happened. It was so violent, so abrupt, it sort of reminded me of an airplane going into the side of a mountain.
"I guess I couldn't believe what I'd just seen. I guess I was in shock for a couple of seconds. Then I started thinking that I'd just seen my little brother killed."
In Franklin, Tenn., 41-year-old Carolyn Waltrip - Michael and Darrell's sister and Darrell's office manager - was listening to the race on the radio. She would have been watching it on television had ESPN decided to show it live instead of on a tape-delayed basis later that night.
"I can't even describe what came over me," she said. "When you're listening on the radio, you never know if you're getting the whole story. I was just praying and hoping that he was going to be all right.
"Then I started to think of my parents, who I knew were back home listening, too. Their health has not been the best and I was hoping they were going to be all right."
Leroy and Margaret Waltrip were back home in Owensboro. Their lives have been wrapped up in cars and racing almost from the start.
"I just thank God that we weren't watching it on TV," said Leroy Waltrip. "Margaret's had a stroke and I'm going back in for more heart tests soon. If we'd seen that on TV, there wouldn't have been any need for any more heart tests.
"We just sat there looking at each other thinking, `My God, is this for real?' "
It was bad enough hearing it on the radio.
Because he started so far back in the field, Waltrip was assigned a pit on the backside row. The pit was close to Turn 2, maybe 100 feet away.
Among those who saw the crash from that vantage point was Waltrip's best friend since their days together at Apollo High in Owensboro, Scott Mercer.
At Bristol, Mercer had been dressed for a while as the smiling Kool-Aid pitcher mascot. But the balloon-like outfit had gotten uncomfortable and cumbersome in the close and busy confines of the pits.
After he took the suit off, Mercer was making himself available to clean the No. 30 Pontiac's window when it came through.
"I was watching Michael coming up toward the leaders when it happened," Mercer said. "I knew he was going to hit, but not like that. It was like a nightmare. It was a cold feeling, empty. It gives me goose bumps to think about it still. I thought it was all over with for him.
"I took off running wide-open. I was probably one of the first ones to get there, but then I just stopped. There was some sheet metal that covered him up so I couldn't see him. I just didn't know whether to pull that sheet metal off and see whether he'd been torn all to pieces or not."
Crew chief Bill Ingle arrived about that time, adding to a large and growing group that included numerous pit workers. Among the first to arrive were driver Rodney Combs of Lost Creek, W.Va., Kyle Petty crew member Richard Bostic and Darrell Waltrip and his crew members, Hammond and Jones.
"The car looked like a train had gone through it or a bomb had gone off in it," Mercer said. "Bill [Ingle] and I looked at each other for a second and then he just started pulling that sheet metal off."
There was no way were they prepared for what they saw next.
"I was thinking there was going to be a piece of sheet metal sticking out of him and him all cut up," Mercer said. "But there he sat, not a scratch on him, not hurt. He was still a little dazed, but he was trying to take his glove off, the way you do when it's real tight, one finger at a time."
Also quick to arrive at the scene was Harold Kinder, a Winston Cup flagman who had been dispatched to the scene because of his expertise with cutting tools and the Jaws of Life.
Meanwhile, up in the tower, Winston Cup director Dick Beaty was giving orders on the radio. Almost immediately, it was determined that a yellow caution flag was not going to be enough. Debris was scattered across the track. Out came a red flag, stopping the cars where they were.
Beaty dispatched a fire truck from the Avoca Volunteer Fire Department in Bristol, a wrecker, an ambulance and a rescue truck.
The ambulance and rescue truck had been stationed in the first turn. The ambulance was driven by Paul Newton of Bristol, Va. He was accompanied by Howard Orfield of the Bristol Life Saving Squad and Cathy Fields of the Lebanon, Va., Life Saving Crew. The rescue truck, which included the Jaws of Life and other tools, was manned by driver John Boggs and Jimmy Moore.
Fleenor, who also is a deputy sheriff in Sullivan County, Tenn., was coming up the road leading to the crossover gate when the accident happened. He didn't see it, but he was listening to NASCAR official on the radio say "put it [the yellow flag] out." Then came the call for the ambulance and fire truck.
"They don't call for the truck and ambulance unless the car gave a pretty hard lick, so I knew it was serious," Fleenor said.
Once Fleenor made his way down the track to the wreckage, one of his first tasks was to clear the crowd of pit workers and others who had gathered so the ambulance could get through.
"When we got there, we didn't have any problem whatsoever," said ambulance driver Newton. "We went right straight to the victim immediately. You see a wreck like that and you expect to be getting the driver up with a shovel, but I was quite shocked at what I saw."
What Newton saw was a driver prepared to assist with his own rescue. Still woozy, Waltrip directed the cutting of the roll cage, saying he feared that it might snap back and conk him on the head.
Then he wanted to know about the car, apparently not realizing there was hardly anything left of it.
"I wanted to say to him, `Mike, what's wrong with this picture?' " Fleenor said. "Most times, [rescue workers] are talking to the driver through the window. But I was standing right there at him, where the motor should have been."
One of the few problems workers had at the scene was their footing. Oil, transmission fluid and other lubricants had leaked all over the place. The stuff covered Waltrip, too. Slick wasn't the word for it.
Darrell Waltrip was a mess, crying profusely when he first laid eyes on his brother.
"Darrell scared me worse than the the wreck did because he was crying and carrying on and I was afraid to look down at that point [because] I thought maybe I had lost something," Michael Waltrip said.
Darrell had to send Hammond to call his parents back in Kentucky.
"I just couldn't handle it," Darrell said.
Once freed from the car, Michael Waltrip did something the rescue personnel didn't like. He stood and took a couple of steps. He had to be urged strongly to lie down so he could be strapped to the back board and put in the ambulance, as dictated by standard rescue procedure.
By that time, the crowd on that side of the track saw that Waltrip was up and about and a huge cheer went up.
Mercer rode with him in the ambulance to the infield hospital. Waltrip still was concerned about the car. No wonder, it had been his favorite.
"He wanted to know if we could fix it," Mercer said. "I told him that I didn't believe we'd be fixing that one."
Car owner Chuck Rider donated what was left of the car to the International Motorsports Hall of Fame at Talladega, Ala. It will be on permanent display there, a spokeswoman for the hall said.
Rider later called builder Banjo Matthews to order another chassis just like the one from the old car.
"Chuck said that any car that went through a crash like that and his driver comes out of it with hardly a scratch, then he wanted another one just like it," said Tom Cotter, Waltrip's publicist.
"I don't like to brag on our cars, because we've had people hurt in them," Matthews said. "But I am an absolute NASCAR person. We've always been very aware of stressing safety and always will be as long as I'm fooling with it. We'd like to think that the car had something to do with him not being hurt.
"I don't use the term `miracle.' I just say a driver was very fortunate not to have been hurt."
Matthews may not have used that term, but plenty of others did.
"Any way you look at it, it was a miracle," Darrell Waltrip said. "God lifted him up out of that car, it hit that wall and disintegrated, and God put him back in it."
Michael Waltrip was taken to the infield hospital for examination.
On duty were Dr. Nelson Gwaltney, emergency room Dr. Bob Mueller and nurses Dreama Thompson, Pat Smith and Brenda Hilt, all of the Bristol Regional Medical Center.
Waltrip was examined and determined to have suffered a mild concussion, some scratches and a bruise or two. That was it.
While he was there, drivers Dale Earnhardt, Rick Wilson, Sterling Marlin and Kyle Petty stopped by to see him.
"They told me I was one tough SOB to have come through something like that," Waltrip said.
Waltrip then was directed to the Bristol hospital as a precaution. He would be flown by the helicopter Med-Flight II, which was stationed at the opposite end of the infield with a crew of pilot Mark Holden and attendant Bill Akers. Akers also is the head of the Lebanon rescue squad.
Gwaltney, Waltrip, Fleenor and NASCAR official Les Richter conferred and decided to transport Waltrip by golf cart to the helicopter. The reasoning was that had an ambulance been used, people in the stands would have feared the worst.
Waltrip waved to the cheering crowd as he rode by.
At the hospital, Waltrip was examined by Dr. James Brassfield, a neurosurgeon, and kept overnight.
Waltrip was hungry. He sent for a meal of soup, fish, chicken, prime rib, green beans, macaroni and cheese, potatoes and a good-sized steak washed down with sweetened tea. He topped that off with a large hunk of strawberry cheesecake and a pint of milk.
"Ate every bit of it," Mercer said. "Inhaled it. Can you believe that?"
Waltrip was tested thoroughly, pronounced fit and released at 8 a.m. Sunday.
At 1:13 p.m. Sunday he was in his Country Time Lemonade/Maxwell House Pontiac, starting 20th in the Winston Cup race and finishing 20th, eight laps down, two flat tires and another scrape with the wall notwithstanding.
That night, he went to bed at about 9 p.m. and slept for 14 hours.
Monday night, he and Mercer played in a Charlotte two-on-two basketball league.
They won 21-12.
Keywords:
AUTO RACING
by CNB