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Davey Hamilton: 'I thought my feet wouldn't be there'

Davey Hamilton feared he wouldn't walk after a horrific 2001 crash. Now he's back racing at Indy.

By Skip Myslenski | Tribune reporter

11:21 PM CDT, May 16, 2008

INDIANAPOLIS - He gets up from behind a table, crosses a small stage, skips down some steps and exits into a hallway.

All of this is remarkable enough because there was a time when Davey Hamilton thought he never would walk again.

That was back in June 2001, right after his horrific crash at Texas Motor Speedway. He was trailing Jeret Schroeder when Schroeder's engine blew and Hamilton spun in its detritus. Suddenly he was airborne and up in a chain link fence before finally sliding across the track and into the infield.

Both his legs were broken. He knew that immediately. But he did not know the severity of his injuries, not until he was in the infield medical center and heard people say it looked as if he would be a double amputee.

"It's not something you want to hear," he said in an interview six weeks after this wreck.

"When I woke up, I thought [my feet] probably wouldn't be there."

Yet they were there when he did awake and eventually he was transported to an Indianapolis hospital not far from Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where Saturday he again will attempt to qualify for the May 25 Indianapolis 500. He did that last year and finished a respectable ninth.

Now he's back once more, looking to add another chapter to his remarkable saga.

"When we were able to get a top 10, any time you can do that in this race, it's a big accomplishment, I feel," he said while standing in the hallway.

"To get that top 10, I was satisfied. … But I felt my car could have been a little better, I could have been a little better. That means we could have finished a little better. So I have to try it again. That was basically the drive to get back here."

That, too, was the drive once he landed in that Indianapolis hospital and began a rehabilitation process that was as long as it was torturous. His feet had to be rebuilt. He was in a wheelchair for longer than a year. He had to learn to walk again. He had to undergo 21 operations.

"Those days when you're laying in the hospital room wondering if you're ever going to walk again," he said. "There are a lot of prayers …

"It took a lot of focus to have the drive to go to rehab every day and to go through all those surgeries. The drive was racing. It was to get back into the position of being here. It was a long road. … I had some [crummy] days in my life. But I'm on top of the world right now. I feel great. I'm having a blast here at Indy. This is what it's about for me. This is what I strive for every year."

Were there times when he thought he would never make it?

"That was after I could walk again," he said. "Probably three years after, I said, 'It's probably not going to happen for me to get back here, to get back in a race car.' I was damaged goods. I didn't have the funding to be able to do it myself without sponsorship to get to a proper team or to a proper program.

"I wasn't going to do it unless it was right. So I felt to get back to Indy was going to be almost impossible."

Hamilton stayed close to his sport with some broadcasting and driving a promotional two-seater, which ferried passengers around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway at speeds up to 175 m.p.h.

Yet not until last year, when he got a ride with Vision Racing, did he go out onto that track and face a challenge as tough as those he confronted during his years of rehab. That challenge was fear.

He laughed when asked about it.

"To say the least," he said. "I was walking down Gasoline Alley [last year], I just thought to myself, 'Who signed me up for this again?' I wanted it. But when you're out doing it, I didn't know if I really did want it. It was definitely scary. It was definitely a scary moment.

"You don't want to go out there and run 180 m.p.h. and come in and say you can't do it anymore. So just being able to get to speed. I was definitely nervous, yeah. Scared, nervous, all of the above. I wanted to succeed. I wanted to be competitive again.

"I didn't have any of those answers until I got the checkered flag in the race."

The race. That long has been the thing for the 45-year old Hamilton, who this spring is driving for Hewlett-Packard/KR Vision Racing. A native of Idaho, he spent an eternity bouncing around short tracks until the 1996 formation of the Indy Racing League gave him admission to a bigger stage.

He was one of that league's originals, one of its pioneers, and so a lifetime of racing already was behind him when he climbed the fence that day in Texas.

Still …

"I didn't want to end my career," he said, wrapping up his remarkable saga, "I had a great career racing all different kinds of cars all over this country, winning a lot of races, having a lot of fun, I didn't want to end a real successful career that I loved in a sport that I loved in an accident.

"So it wasn't so much proving myself. It was wanting to come back and end it in a different way."

smyslenski@tribune.com