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Back In The Driver's Seat At The Brickyard

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By TONY FABRIZIO

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 23, 2008

Updated: 05/23/2008 12:23 am

INDIANAPOLIS - There were 21 operations to repair his mangled legs and feet, and two more to remove "hardware."

Add thousands of hours of rehab.

Six years after a horrific crash at Texas Motor Speedway, Davey Hamilton not only came back to race in the 2007 Indianapolis 500, he finished ninth.

He's back again for Sunday's 92nd Indy, maybe with an even better car.

"I love this place," Hamilton, 45, said of Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where he has made seven starts and has a best finish of fourth in 1998. "As a driver, it's hard to get it out of your system."

A short-track racer out of Idaho, Hamilton was one of the early standouts of Tony George's fledgling Indy Racing League. He was the championship runner-up to Tony Stewart in 1997 and Kenny Brack in 1998.

Somehow, Hamilton never won a race, though, and in 2001 at Texas, he was in the worst possible place when Jeret Schroeder's engine blew.

Hamilton's car spun in the oil, catapulted into the catch fence and shredded, exposing the driver's feet and legs to the steel mesh.

Initially, Hamilton thought he wasn't badly injured. Then he heard one of the emergency responders call for the rescue helicopter and say, "There appears to be a double amputee."

Hamilton suffered massive bone, tissue and nerve damage to his feet and legs. Even so, doctors were able to save his legs.

What followed, along with the 23 operations, was a slow and arduous recovery. Hamilton spent more than a year in a wheelchair. He had to learn to walk again.

"Thank God you can't re-enact pain, because I definitely went through a lot," Hamilton says. "I spent a lot of time in a hyperbaric chamber a pressure chamber that forces high concentrations of oxygen into the tissue. It was a lot of work, but then when you weren't working, you felt kind of helpless."

Buddy Lazier won the 1996 Indianapolis 500 months after suffering a fractured back. Had he crashed again soon, he might have been paralyzed.

He says he can understand why Hamilton would risk his ability to walk by driving 220 mph at Indianapolis again.

"It's partly the love of the sport," Lazier said. "But it's also the need for a driver to say, 'Hey, I'm back. I'm back to where I was or close to where I was.'"

Eddie Cheever, the 1998 Indy winner and now an ABC/ESPN analyst, was friends with Hamilton when they raced together.

Now he's also an admirer.

"I just think he's cool," Cheever said. "When somebody asks about Davey, I say that's the coolest guy in the field, period. Almost had his feet torn off - the fence was like a cheese grater at Texas - and he always had a smile on his face, always talked about coming back here."

Eventually, Hamilton was able to do some broadcast work for the IRL radio network. He landed a job driving one of the IRL's two-seater cars, giving racetrack rides to media, sponsors and VIPs. In fact, he still drives the two-seater.

Hamilton's left ankle is fused, and he has almost no movement in his left foot and limited movement in his right foot. He still has pins and rods in his legs. The limitations could not keep him from Indy, or even from running some super modified and sprint car races last year.

As he did last year, he is driving for Vision Racing, the team owned by George and actor Patrick Dempsey. Ed Carpenter and A.J. Foyt IV are the team's regular drivers. Carpenter has been fast at times this season, leading to speculation the Vision cars could be competitive Sunday.

Hamilton brings his own sponsorship - that's the only way he could race - and this time it's Hewlett-Packard and Kingdom Racing, a Christian outreach organization.

"I think the focus and tenacity he's had to have to get himself back into a racecar is amazing," former driver Scott Goodyear said. "The other side of that, he's done the business side of the sport, which is to make sure he's had the funding to bring himself back to Indianapolis. I don't think too many drivers could have done that."

Cheever tells of Hamilton spending time at his house after one of his surgeries and tracking blood on his carpet because the skin on his feet was so thin.

"I got angry and said, 'You're making a mess of the carpet,'" Cheever said. "And he said, 'This happens all the time.' There wasn't one iota of, 'Poor me, this is terrible.'

"You look at this guy and you think he's a California surfer or something. But this guy is tough."

And once again, he's back.

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