Fred Lorenzen was inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame on Jan. 30, 2015. Throughout the 1960s, he was one of the best wheelmen in the sport, nicknamed "The Golden Boy."
His children, Chris Lorenzen and Amanda Lorenzen-Gardstrom, were optimistic about the trip to the Hall of Fame in Charlotte, North Carolina, where Fred would become one of the first 25 drivers to be enshrined. Their father had been living at a nursing home under around-the-clock care for a few years. He had lost the ability to walk and dementia was settling in. There was, as Chris said, “a zero-percent chance” that Fred could give a speech, so his son delivered it for him at the podium.
The reality of her father's physical and mental state hit Amanda hard during that trip.
“In
this fairy tale fantasy world, I thought that when we got there and he saw his old friends, this would go away, and that he would be so happy to be there and with his old buddies,” Amanda said recently. “His memory was too far gone."
Fred Lorenzen died in 2024 just 12 days short of what would have been his 90th birthday. Now, nearly two years later, his family is sharing their story and the results of his postmortem brain tissue analysis with USA TODAY Sports.
Researchers at the Boston University CTE Center diagnosed Lorenzen with stage 3 chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
Lorenzen – a Daytona 500 winner – is the first former NASCAR driver to be diagnosed with CTE.
“It's overwhelming to get to where we are today," Amanda said. "There were so many stages of grief, of loss and not understanding things. It makes me understand why. It doesn't make anything better at all, but it makes me able to understand why things happened the way they happened."
CTE is a degenerative brain disease associated with repeated head injuries and progressive, long-term loss of cognitive function. Currently, it can only be definitively diagnosed after death. It is most often found in people who participated in contact sports or served in military combat. A study released in August led by researchers at Boston University and Harvard Medical School found that roughly 1 in 4 former NFL players who died between 2016 and 2021 had CTE.
The research of CTE within motorsports isn't as comprehensive compared to what has been discovered in former NFL players. However, the news of Lorenzen’s diagnosis comes less than a month after the family of NASCAR icon Darrell Waltrip released a statement saying he would be stepping away from public life after being diagnosed with frontotemporal degeneration, a brain disease that could be "complicated by possible" CTE.
Chris Lorenzen wasn’t shocked at all when he read the statement from the Waltrip Family.
“In my head, it was like, we already know that,” Chris said. “Just in my opinion, if we're seeing all these former NFL players with CTE from head injuries, how would NASCAR be any different? This is going high speeds, into a wall, into another car. It’s the same thing.
"I think we know what the results of other drivers donating their brain is going to be. So, the question is, can we somehow help these injured drivers earlier? Because our dad didn't have any help."
NASCAR did not respond to USA TODAY Sports' request for comment about Lorenzen's diagnosis prior to publication.
In honor of their dad, Chris and Amanda have made a $1 million donation to the Concussion & CTE Foundation to advance research and help struggling drivers find care. The donation will create the Fred Lorenzen Memorial HelpLine.
While Fred Lorenzen’s diagnosis provides some closure to his children, it doesn’t take away the pain they felt watching their father fade away, nor does it return to them the decades they lost with him while he was still alive.
"There’s some relief to know this is what he had as opposed to he just declined and we can't explain why," Chris said. “You know, I'm 53 now. Just into my very early 30s, in all reality, he was gone. I was never able to share the better things that I've experienced in my life with him. Nor did he know of my successes and stuff like that. In reality, he sort of passed in the mid-2000s."
Amanda added: “I have two kids. He never really got to be a grandparent. I almost feel like it was 35 years of just constant heartbreak of some form."
Fred Lorenzen became one of NASCAR's first superstars
By the time Chris and Amanda were born, their father had retired from NASCAR racing and didn’t talk about his days flying around the racetrack all that much. The kids knew that their father was a racecar driver, but they didn’t know much about his decorated career aside from the trophies that filled the basement in their Oakbrook, Illinois home.
There was a pool table in that room, too. One time as a kid, Amanda pulled a pool stick back a bit too aggressively and knocked one of the wings off a large trophy.
"I was like, 'Oh we should glue that,'" Amanda recalled with a laugh. "It was the Daytona 500 trophy. I didn't really realize what the magnitude of that trophy meant. He never talked about racing much to us. It was a pretty closed door. Once he quit, it hurt him too much to go back to the track.
"Our dad was very humble, a good man. He'd spend Sunday mornings responding to fan mail."
Fred Lorenzen was known to fans by many nicknames: the Golden Boy, the Elmhurst Express and Fearless Freddie. He was charismatic, cool and smooth, had leading-man looks, was friendly to fans, and was an expert in pushing a racecar to its absolute limits. Lorenzen is often referred to as one of NASCAR’s first superstars, and in 1963 he became the first driver to earn more than $100,000 in a single season. He was twice voted the sport’s Most Popular Driver.
A native of Elmhurst, Illinois, Lorenzen caught the racing bug after listening to a radio broadcast of the Southern 500. As a kid, he built a go-kart powered by a lawn mower engine and raised hell around the streets of his hometown until the police took it away. He won a demolition derby in high school, raced on dirt tracks and at Soldier Field in Chicago, and later won two United States Auto Club (USAC) championships in 1958 and 1959. Lorenzen won 12 USAC races in about three dozen starts between 1956 and 1964.
Lorenzen made his NASCAR debut in 1956 at age 21, and went on to capture many checkered flags in a career that stretched through 1972. Lorenzen placed inside the top 10 in more than 53% of his starts in the premier circuit of stockcar racing. In 1964, he won eight of the 16 races he entered, including a stretch of five consecutive victories.
The talented Midwesterner competed with southern legends of the sport and earned their respect. Lorenzen had a rivalry with Junior Johnson while also racing alongside the likes of Fireball Roberts, Bobby Allison, Ned Jarrett, Wendell Scott and Richard Petty. His best years behind the wheel were spent powering the No. 28 for Holman-Moody, rolling into victory lane 26 times with the Ford factory team.
While Lorenzen won crown jewel races on big speedways — winning the World 600 in Charlotte twice and taking victory in the 1965 Daytona 500 — he was a force on short tracks, too. Lorenzen won six times at Martinsville and ran the final race of his career there in 1972. In 2023, Lorenzen was named one of NASCAR's 75 Greatest Drivers.
"You make your own way. I earned it, I guess," Lorenzen told TNT in 2009. "The fans are what make you run, and they were my heroes. They make you go fast. It was a dream come true. All the work you did all your life, it's something you can't describe."
As Fred Lorenzen’s health declined, his family's trajectory changed
At age 37, Lorenzen was finished with racing. He started a family and had a successful career in real estate, but would often say in interviews about his time in NASCAR that he "retired too soon." What he didn’t know at the time was the toll that 158 starts behind the wheel and countless crashes would take on his body.
"There was a huge head injury at Riverside," said Amanda, who documented all of her father's racing injuries over the years. "He promised the doctors that he'd come back to Chicago and see a neurologist, and they let him go, and he just hopped right back in the car and drove with a cut artery. It was a badge of honor. You're not stepping away from the race car if you can get in it … You got to protect the athletes from themselves sometimes.
"He retired to have a family and to be a dad. That was a big deal to him."
Beginning around the time she was in middle school, Amanda started to notice changes in her father’s behavior. He would become more impulsive, angry and repetitive, she said. Chris started to see differences too, observing that his father was getting more anxious, was easily annoyed and incredibly impatient.
"Although I didn’t know what CTE was at the time, I just assumed it was due to concussions," Chris said. "In 2006, there was definitely something going on. His patience level was gone. He could hardly attend Amanda's wedding."
That year would be a turning point for Fred Lorenzen’s declining health and how it impacted his family. Amanda’s wedding was in Mexico and Fred was "very confused" throughout, attempting to leave a few times.
"Wanting to leave my wedding night, that's pretty stressful and kind of just horrible," Amanda said. "You know, a woman wants their dad to be there. He gave me away, but it was not what you would imagine … We had a mom too, you know, and this whole issue created a divorce. So, it totally changed the trajectory of what our parents imagined for our lives."
Amanda and Chris also noticed that their father's gait had changed. Four years later, Fred suffered a bad fall and never fully recovered. He lost function in his legs and used a wheelchair for his final 14 years. Fred was also "not putting up with" the nurses hired for in-home care, Chris said, so his family was forced to move him into an assisted living facility for 24-hour attention – something that Chris estimates cost in the ballpark of $200,000 per year.
"He didn't have that money. Luckily, life has treated me really well," Chris said. "But you know, that's one of the sad things – a lot of other racecar drivers that likely have CTE, they're going to be in a similar situation, and my guess is their family is not going to be able to afford it. That's sort of the reason for the helpline is to potentially give these NASCAR drivers, whether still driving or not driving, some type of help because we didn't have that."
Unlike stick-and-ball sports, NASCAR drivers do not have a union or anything akin to a players' association. Drivers are essentially all independent contractors. If they have health care in retirement, that's something that would have been negotiated between the driver and their race team.
We are deeply saddened by the passing of Fred Lorenzen, a true NASCAR legend and a cornerstone of Ford's racing history. Fred’s hands-on approach, talent and charisma helped shape the sport, earning him iconic victories and a rightful place in the hearts of fans and the NASCAR… pic.twitter.com/qsaTsJUUYg
— Ford Racing (@FordRacing) December 18, 2024
What doctors found in Fred Lorenzen’s brain
A year after Lorenzen entered the NASCAR Hall of Fame, his children had the idea to pledge his brain for donation to the Concussion & CTE Foundation. Lorenzen would be the second NASCAR driver to do so, following the commitment Dale Earnhardt Jr. had made. Amanda approached her dad and had a difficult conversation.
"I was nervous about it because it's kind of awkward, right? Asking your parent, like, 'Do you want to donate your brain when you die?' And he did respond," Amanda said. "He said, 'Sure, whatever would help someone else.'"
Other former motorsports stars have since pledged to donate their brains to research too, including former NASCAR winner Jerry Nadeau, NHRA competitors Ron Capps and Leah Pruett, and three-time Indianapolis 500 winner Dario Franchitti.
Fred Lorenzen's brain was the first belonging to a former NASCAR driver to be examined by researchers at the Boston University CTE Center. Compared to the study of brains of football players, research on head injuries in motorsports and how they might lead to CTE is sparse.
A study conducted by researchers in Monaco published in May found that former professional motorsport drivers with brain health concerns frequently exhibited mild, nonspecific neurological abnormalities. It called for large-scale studies to specifically investigate the effects of repeated head impacts. A 2016 study by researchers at the University of Cambridge noted that "the published evidence on the incidence, severity and recovery" on concussions in motorsports and the impacts of them "remains scarce."
More than 1,900 brains have come through the Boston University CTE Center. Dr. Thor Stein and Dr. Ann McKee have examined every one of them.
Stein leads the Neuropathology Core at the Boston University Alzheimer’s Disease Research and CTE Center, where he oversees neuropathological analyses and diagnoses. Beginning about 15 years ago, his research has focused on neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, ALS and CTE.
The way Stein and others at the CTE Center work on a brain, initially, is without any details. When Stein begins examining a brain, he doesn't know anything about the person’s life. After he has finished his diagnosis report, he meets with the clinical team who has interviewed the family about the person’s life. Simply put, when Stein was examining Lorenzen’s brain, he didn't know if it came from a racecar driver, a football player, or someone else.
“I was surprised when I heard about his extensive history with racing and all of the injuries that he had there. And then, in pretty early life, the behavioral and mood issues that he really struggled with, and then later on some of the cognitive pieces and even some of the motor Parkinson-like symptoms that he developed,” Stein said. “Once I heard that, it made sense with the pathology.
“What (Lorenzen) had was a unique type of CTE. It wasn't the kind of classic type of CTE that we often see in football players – they tend to have more of an overwhelming frontal low burden and cortical burden. (Lorenzen) had a much greater burden in those deeper parts of the brain."
Lorenzen, Stein said, had a subtype of CTE called cortical-sparing CTE. It is present in about 11% of all CTE cases and patients typically show an earlier onset of behavioral, mood and motor symptoms. It's not yet known why people develop this specific subtype, Stein said.
"A single hit, a single concussion – that’s not enough to cause CTE. You really need to have hundreds, thousands of these over many years. The blows to the head or the acceleration forces on the brain in people who don't have the symptoms of a concussion can be just as big or even greater than people who do have a concussion.
"It's that quick acceleration, deceleration where – even if you're strapped in – the brain is still moving. It's kind of floating in this fluid and it's still moving within the head, and it's that twisting, that movement that causes damage. If that occurs over and over, then that's what leads to this disease, CTE."
While Lorenzen is the first NASCAR driver to be diagnosed with CTE, former BMX and rallycross star Dave Mirra was found to have CTE by neuropathologists at the University of Toronto after his death in 2016.
The goal of the Concussion & CTE Foundation, and the Boston University CTE Center, is to develop a way to diagnose CTE in living people and then get them help. The gift from the Lorenzens will be impactful and Stein believes it comes at a crucial time.
"The technologies have really developed that allow us to detect some of the pathologies in the brain that leak into the blood. I think we're very close with CTE to having something, and I think this is really going to help us get there much faster," Stein said. "I think it is really an exciting time in terms of really developing these biomarkers and hopefully getting treatments."
What’s next for NASCAR's concussion, CTE discussion?
The Lorenzen Family and NASCAR had several talks this year about working together on an effort to fund additional studies into CTE, but ultimately that partnership did not come to fruition.
Still, in the decades that have passed since Fred Lorenzen last sat behind the wheel of a racecar, NASCAR has made big changes when it comes to safety.
Not long after Dale Earnhardt was killed on the final lap of the Daytona 500 in 2001, NASCAR began mandating the use of the HANS (head and neck support) device, a restraint designed to keep the head and shoulders of a driver in place during a frontal impact. It sits on top of a driver’s shoulders and attaches to the helmet. No driver has died from an on-track incident in any of the top three national touring circuits since Earnhardt.
In 2003, NASCAR implemented the SAFER (steel and foam energy reduction) barrier at all of its tracks. Added to the walls around speedways, these barriers reduce G-forces by up to 80%, soaking up the impact of crashes and reducing injuries to drivers. NASCAR also made design improvements in seats, belts, helmets and cockpits, and began collecting crash data.
Additionally, NASCAR has mandated baseline concussion testing and has an on-site neurologist staffed at the infield care center for every national series race. Every driver must visit the care center if they are involved in an on-track incident. NASCAR also has a partnership with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Dr. Mickey Collins, a resource drivers often use following a head injury. Each year, NASCAR brings in Collins for a mandatory session with all rookies about the dangers of concussions and head injuries.
Beginning about a decade ago, a team at Wake Forest University started developing a mouthpiece sensor that collects data and measures what happens to a driver’s head during a crash, similar to a "black box" inside of a car. The data gleaned from the mouthpiece sensors led NASCAR to repave the "bus stop" at Watkins Glen to make that area less aggressive and bumpy as drivers raced across it. NASCAR says the data captured from these mouthpieces is all-encompassing, from what happens to the skull as the jack drops the car after a pit stop to a hit into a SAFER barrier.
Kyle Larson, Joey Logano, Ryan Blaney, Tyler Reddick, Daniel Suárez and Austin Cindric are among the drivers who have voluntarily used the mouthpieces.
NASCAR has also been working with Biocore – an independent biomechanics testing laboratory that evaluates helmets for the NFL – to improve helmets that drivers use.
One example of the strides NASCAR has made in safety came in June at Michigan, when Christopher Bell pounded the inside wall at 63 Gs of force, making it the hardest crash in at least a decade in the sport. Bell walked away from his totaled No. 20 Toyota with a fractured wrist.
But head injuries still happen. Riley Herbst, driver of the No. 35 Toyota for 23XI Racing, sat out of the Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona this year after suffering a concussion in a wreck at New Hampshire. Alex Bowman, driver of the No. 48 Chevrolet for Hendrick Motorsports, missed four races this season due to vertigo.
"I think it's anytime you have a big hit," NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace said when asked how often he thinks about the long-term impacts of racing. "It's always kind of in the back of your mind. You got to take care of yourself."
William Byron believes he's racing in a much safer era of NASCAR.
"I think our cars are really safe. Have I had some impacts that I question? Sure, but I don't think it's anything like it was in the 80s or 90s where they were hitting concrete walls and having multiple head injuries a year probably that weren't diagnosed," Byron said. "Hopefully, when I'm done driving, I have plenty of time to get the necessary help and treatment I need, if that's possible."
Other drivers try not to think about the effects of head injuries at all.
"Not a whole lot, because I'm living right now," Ryan Preece said. "I don't know, man. I signed up for this career. I kind of know the risks. I'm willing to do the things that I do."
Fred Lorenzen’s legacy adds its unfortunate postscript
In interviews reflecting on his racing career, Fred Lorenzen often considered his win in the 1961 Rebel 300 at Darlington to be his greatest victory. He was the pole-sitter in his No. 28 Ford for Holman-Moody, and battled with Fireball Roberts and Curtis Turner across 219 laps in front of more than 32,000 people on a hot day in South Carolina. In the end, Lorenzen pulled away from Turner and won by six car lengths.
Before the race, team owner Ralph Moody had written a simple message on Lorenzen's dash: "THINK!"
That ability to think and act quickly in the moment was stripped from Lorenzen in the latter years of his life.
As his accolades on speedways across the country fade into the past, Lorenzen’s diagnosis adds a new chapter to his legacy as one of the greatest NASCAR drivers. His children hope that it leads to change.
"CTE is not going away," his daughter Amanda said. "There are a lot of people who benefit from this sport. NASCAR should be investing in treatment for retired drivers suffering from CTE and in research to eventually find a cure. If we're all going to benefit from this sport, then we should all share the responsibility of taking care of the people we watch and the people who built it. That’s where I'm coming from. That’s what I'd like to see.
"That would probably be the only thing that makes me feel better for what Chris and I and our dad had to go through."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: NASCAR legend diagnosed with CTE, lived '35 years of constant heartbreak'
