A piece I did last fall just came out in Popular Mechanics! You can see the article here. Show it in Nevada on a friend who was born arthrogryposis. Despite that though he has gotten into racing cars and is actually pretty damn good at it! It's really amazing.
I will write more about the experience later but for now here is the write up by Jennifer Bogo.
On saturday morning in Fallon, Nevada, the casinos that populate the town's main drag offer eggs over easy and slot machines, depending on one's preference. But by late afternoon, the draw shifts to a dusty knob of earth just east of town, and the intersections fill with a steady procession of Dodge Rams and Ford F-150s hauling trailers. They're all wending their way to a quarter-mile banked dirt track called Rattlesnake Raceway, where the spray of mud and the thrill of competition far eclipse the $100 purse.
The 22-year-old champion of the 2007 and 2008 Gen X class--which consists mainly of four-cylinder stock sedans--drives fast, both on and off the track. "I love racing. I love competitions. I love speed," Chris Neal says. "Anything over 100 mph is very good." He also talks fast and walks fast, which at first glance seems unlikely. Chris stands in a permanent plié, his knees deeply bent and turned out, his feet pointing backward. When he moves, it's like a sand crab, sideways, his legs scissoring past each other. He throws the rest of his body after them.
At his dad's auto repair shop, 4 miles from the raceway, Chris leans through the window of a '76 Pontiac Firebird to point out the hand controls. Attached to the steering column is a lever, connected to the foot pedals, that he pushes down to accelerate and forward to brake. Because he has very little dexterity in his fingers, he uses the back of his left hand to manipulate the lever and steers with his right hand at 12 o'clock.
Maneuvering around a Lincoln Town Car and GMC pickup, Chris heads out the back door. He's wearing a royal blue fireproof suit, half-zipped with the arms tied around his waist, and a black-and-white T-shirt that says, "I didn't come here to lose." Glued to his right hip is a nine-month-old chocolate Lab named Sadie, who wears a pink rhinestone Harley-Davidson collar and a serious expression. She watches him intently. "She's as loyal as all get-out," Chris says. "I don't fall as much as I used to, but when I do, if I say 'brace,' she'll jump in front of me so I'll fall on her. I'm always dropping my phones and stuff like that because I don't have a strong grip. She can pick stuff up for me."
Behind the shop is a battered yellow quad that Chris rides around the desert--he uses a metal bar welded onto the shifter to push it into first. He also snow skis with a sit-ski and hunts elk and mule deer, propping up a .243 rifle and pulling the trigger with his thumb. When it comes to the limits imposed by his disability, Chris follows one maxim: "If someone says I can't do it, you might as well count on me trying."
That Chris can walk at all, let alone drive, ski and hunt, is an impressive accomplishment. He was born with arthrogryposis, a congenital disorder that affects one in 3000 children and results in curved joints and contracted muscles. Chris's particular condition, distal arthrogryposis, severely affects his hands and feet. When he was born, his legs were folded up like a pretzel, his dad Larry says. Doctors warned he'd never walk; as a baby, he didn't crawl. "He rolled everywhere he wanted to go," Larry says. "He could go from one room to another 90 mph." As a toddler he chased other kids around on his knees, which developed thick calluses.
Chris was sent to Shriners Hospitals for Children in Northern California, where doctors pinned an Ilizarov frame to his leg bones when he was four. It enveloped Chris like an Erector Set, and his mom Jana adjusted it a little every day until his legs unfolded. When surgeons removed the frame, he was sent to Sonny Alcairo, an orthotist at Shriners, to be fitted for braces that would stretch from the tops of his legs to his toes. "He's one of the kids I loved working with because he was a challenge each time you made a brace for him," Alcairo says. As Chris got older, his hips and leg bones continued to rotate out. "When they get to that point, [most kids] actually just give up on walking," Alcairo says. Not Chris: "We call him the miracle kid. I've never seen anyone as determined as he is."
Chris grew up around cars, first in a playpen in the middle of his dad's Texaco station, then in the pit at drag races, where both of his parents competed. But when, at age 16, he announced he wanted to race cars himself, his parents were skeptical. "I thought, how's he going to do it?" Jana says. "At the time, most everybody, when they raced, had standard transmissions." It turned out that racing an automatic was more common than she thought. But Larry still resisted. "The thing that scared me was that if he caught on fire, he couldn't get out of the car," Larry says. "I was just worried to death that he would get burned up."
Larry installed a grenade pin to Chris's hand controls instead of a bolt, so they would quickly detach from the steering column to get out of his way. Then Chris practiced unlatching his safety belts and hauling himself through the open window. "I can get everything undone and out in 35 or 40 seconds," Chris says. "That's not real fast," Larry says, "but fast enough." So in 2007, Chris began racing at Rattlesnake as a rookie--and raced well. "I don't know how he does it," Larry says. "He's unreal. The first two years they'd start him at the back of the pack, and within one lap he was in the lead and would just walk away from them."
Still anxious about a fire, Larry practically lived at the track. Then, when it happened, he was over in the pit helping Jana, who was also racing in the Gen X class. On the wall in the office of Larry's shop is a color photo of Chris's car at the time, a yellow '00 Mitsubishi Galant, just after T-boning the Honda Prelude of a friend who'd spun out--flames are leaping from the hood. The other driver is halfway out his window, frozen in the motion of going to pull Chris from the burning vehicle. After raising himself up to the window, Chris escaped unharmed. He also won the points championship that year. His trophy, which sits on a shelf near the photo, is a good foot taller than Jana's--she tied for third place.
For the 2009 season, Chris moved up two classes to Hobby Stock, which meant a V8 engine and rear-wheel drive, and more experienced competitors. "Gen X was getting ... not easy, but boring," Chris says. But the Firebird proved trickier to steer with hand controls, and he'd spin out coming into the corners. That tendency, combined with the carsflying around the track at 100 mph, made him a little bit "chicken-y," Chris says. "I didn't want to spin out in front of the whole pack and have everybody plow into me."
By September, he still hadn't won any races, but he felt like his car was finally set up properly. There was just one lingering problem. When steering, it typically takes two-and-a-half turns of the wheel to move the tires from full right lock to full left. Chris's right arm is stronger than his left, but it doesn't have enough muscle to do that easily. Hours before the evening race, the last one of the regular season, Larry and Jana installed a steering quickener--a reverse-mounted reduction gearbox that changes the ratio of the turns between the steering wheel and the steering box. Now it takes Chris only half a turn to move the tires from lock to lock.
At the raceway, Jana hoists Chris up and through the open window of his car, Dukes of Hazzard style. He settles into the stripped-out interior, ankles crossed, and locks the hand controls in place. Then he flips a switch to turn on the engine and shifts it into gear with his wrist. Jana climbs a small hill to watch the qualifying heat through a chain-link fence, since she's the pit crew. "One thing about Chris: He's good at the start," she says. "As soon as they drop the flag, he's gone. A lot of guys are sleeping."
Chris's blue Firebird, No. 12, launches into the race, but the track has just been watered down. One car spins out and Chris slides a little on the corner. He finishes third out of five. After the heat, Chris and his parents debate whether his car is tight or loose--whether the front or rear wheels slide first--then adjust his tire pressure. He gets back in the car and queues up in the middle of the pack for the feature race.
When the green flag is dropped, Chris takes off again, his Firebird standing out against a blur of Monte Carlos, Novas and Camaros. On successive laps, Chris passes three cars, then creeps up on another. "It looks like it's handling good for him," Jana says. Chris passes two more cars and a cheer goes up--he appears to be just three cars from the lead.
Then, as Chris is coming around the corner, hugging close to the inside, a white Monte Carlo nudges his left rear fender. Chris veers through the mud in the center of the oval track and out the other side, ending up near the back of the pack. With just a few laps to go, that's where he finishes.
After the race, the Monte Carlo's driver walks up to the pit and begins to apologize--to a 25-year-old photographer, who is wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Chris is leaning against his car, and he's wearing the blue fireproof suit. "Hey," Chris says, waving. "I'm the driver." The guy starts his apology over, to Chris now, but when he leaves, Chris looks frustrated. "I'm wearing the race suit, but I'm short and crippled," he says. "They always come up and apologize to someone else."
It's a rare moment of deflation, and it doesn't last long. "Now it's just getting used to the quick steer," he says. "I was just kind of squirrelly out of the corner, so it wasn't bad. It didn't hurt me in the race." Eventually, Chris wants to move to North or South Carolina, where there are a lot more dirt
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