“The one on top of my left leg was a big, open wound.”
—DALE EARNHARDT JR.
wound you might have, road rash or some- thing. It was easy to handle then.”
•• Why do it? Why risk not only slowing
one’s recovery time but run the risk of doing even more damage by continuing to compete? Points? Pride? Ego? Yes. And fear is a factor as well. No driver wants to appear fragile, but
Completing the race at Loudon, he says,
was out of the question. “I was lucky to even be allowed to be in
there [for the start],” Earnhardt says. “It took a long, long, long time [for the
injuries to heal]. I couldn’t believe it. Te one on top of my left leg was a big, open wound. I thought I should have gotten a skin graft there, but it just slowly closed up. It took forever for that to happen. “Tere was no skin … it was all muscle
there. It was bleeding and that week in New Hampshire, I had to change bandages every four hours or so. I don’t think I could have driven the race with it bleeding and carrying on and drying up, sweating and all that. By the time I would have gotten out of the car, I don’t know how I could have removed the bandages because they would have been stuck to me. Tat would have been too painful. “It took a long time for that one deal to
close up. But once it got pretty close, it was bearable. It was just like any other kind of
64 NASCAR ILLUSTRATED
perhaps just as important, no driver wants to chance being upstaged by someone else while he mends on the sidelines. “Tis is our life,” Penske Racing driver
Brad Keselowski says. “Tis is what I do. I drive race cars for a living. “Te second somebody else gets in there,
you’ve just got replaced. “You fight so hard to find your seat, to find
your spot, your way in this sport that you’re not going to let somebody else replace you.” Keselowski made the comments while
nursing a broken left ankle, an injury sustained in a crash during testing at Road Atlanta in August. A brake failure had sent his car hurtling
into a barrier at more than 100 mph. “I hit about as hard as you can hit in one
of these cars and I’m still here somehow,” Keselowski said just days later as the Cup cir- cuit arrived at Pocono Raceway. “As a driver, probably one of your worst nightmares is going through a corner … without a SAFER barrier, without any of the stuff that we’ve gotten accustomed to, without brakes. And
knowing that I had two or three seconds staring at a wall, knowing that I was going to hit it about as hard as you possibly could. “Somehow, I made it through it, broke the
wall down and came flying through on the other side. I was just really, really lucky.” With his ankle broken and swollen to the
size of a grapefruit, Keselowski chose to race in spite of the pain. His payoff? Te 27-year- old wound up in victory lane at Pocono, giving him two wins for the season and keeping his Chase hopes alive. Te opportunity to keep himself in the playoff picture didn’t play into his decision to
Top left: Bill Stafford/LAT Photographic; Middle left: LaDon George
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