The driver is slowly healing from a vicious crash last year, but is running out of patience.
By BRANT JAMES
Published May 15, 2004
Jerry Nadeau is in a hurry. Has been for years. Ever since racing started consuming his waking thoughts nearly 30 years ago.
But the past year has been even worse. Nadeau is in a hurry to atone for what he sees as an unforgivable mistake, one that may have cost him his career.
But in the ultimate cruelty for a driver, all he can do is wait. Be patient. Contemplate. Heal.
"I know I have a problem, so I'm not afraid to say it," he said. "It's just so hard to sit back and wait."
Since the most violent recorded impact in NASCAR history on May 2, 2003, in practice at Richmond International Raceway, the 33-year-old continues to rehabilitate in hopes of making a return. But recovery from brain injuries cannot be rushed. Though Nadeau has regained full vision, the left side of his body remains numb much of the time. Though his speech is slowly returning to its normal cadence, he admits he is sometimes slow to react or process information.
"I have 20/20 vision and I can do everything a normal person can do, but going 180 mph you don't want to take a chance," he said. "I can't say I feel the way I did before the crash. Being a racer, you have to be a little bit abnormal."
So Nadeau occupies his time cutting the grass outside his garage, where he stores his motorcoach and the racing simulator he uses for practice. He leases out half of the space to Nextel Cup rookie Kasey Kahne. He plays with 15-month-old daughter Natalie, being the father he never would have been without the accident. He stops by the old race shop, cutting up with the guys and luring them from work for a day at the go-kart track.
He tries to find an explanation for what happened.
"I realize I screwed up," he said. "I can't say it was anybody's fault. I can't say it was the track's fault or a mechanical fault. All I know is I spun around and hit the wall and that was it. All I know is I was the fastest car at that time and if I'd slowed down just a little bit ... I mean it was like my 10th lap in practice.
"I just have a hard time to believe that I (expletive) up that bad. Excuse my language. I'm very hard on myself. I can drive a loose car anywhere. I don't know what happened. I watched the video. All it shows is I just lost it and the car took off fast. I'm just upset."
Nadeau, who had a win and 19 top 10s in five full seasons, hit the wall between Turns 1 and 2 with an impact measured at 135 Gs. The violence of the crash was the impetus for a NASCAR-wide push to put impact-reducing barriers on walls, but it did Nadeau no good.
Ryan Pemberton, Nadeau's friend and crew chief at the time of the accident, said Nadeau is being too hard on himself.
"He's crazy," Pemberton said. "That's what Jerry Nadeau did: He went fast. Sometimes he went too fast. At that point and time he was the fastest car on the racetrack by far and probably went too fast that last lap.
"Is that a fault? I don't know. But that's what'll put him back in a race car one day. You never had to ask Jerry Nadeau to go fast."
But doctors and family had to ask him to go slowly. After spending three weeks in a Virginia hospital, he began a rehabilitation process that continues with a thrice-weekly exercise program.
Though his MB2 Motorsports team put him through an on-track evaluation in December, it had already hired veteran Joe Nemechek at the end of the 2003 season to replace Nadeau in the No. 01 Chevrolet.
Nadeau still stops by the Concord, N.C., shop from time to time, but he admits he sometimes feels like an outsider.
"I wouldn't say they dropped me," he said. "Obviously, they're giving me some time to heal, they tell me I'm walking better or talking better, but they don't know the (expletive) I've gone through.
"I would love to say the team is waiting for me and when I'm ready I can come back. I can't say that. I'm going to do as good as I can and when I feel like I'm ready ... I can understand if my team or anyone else doesn't want me."
The team has been publicly supportive.
"He's part of our family, part of our team," said Jay Frye, chief executive officer and general manager of MB2/MBV Motorsports. "When he's ready to go again, we'll go again."
Pemberton struggles to be a good friend while maintaining a level of productivity for a program that has moved on. Sometimes he does not have time for a quick chat when Nadeau pops into the shop.
"Racing takes up 99 percent of your time, so if you have friends and you want to see them, they better be at the track every week," Pemberton said. "Even when we were working together, you'd see him at the motorhome lot or the garage or whatever."
Pemberton admits at times the relationship must be awkward for Nadeau.
"It's weird for me," he said. "When he comes to the shop, he's not the focus. I don't need to corner him and sit him down and say here's what we're working on this week, this is what we're doing, this is what we need to try and accomplish this week. The focus has been changed. I have to corner Joe for this stuff."
Nadeau insists he's a lucky man. He spends more time with his wife, Andrea, whom he had long "dissed" for racing. He knows his daughter better than he would if not for the accident, he has grown closer to his father, Gerard, who moved from Connecticut to North Carolina to be with his son after the accident. And as frustrated as Nadeau feels, as much as he hopes one day he will wake up and the numbness on his left side will be gone, he is thankful to be alive. Five months after his accident, Nadeau came to realize that.
In October, Nadeau's friend, DeLand resident Tony Renna, died testing an open-wheel car at Indianapolis Motor Speedway on his first day of work for Chip Ganassi Racing.
Still, Nadeau gives away some of his inner feeling about himself when talking about Renna.
"That was tough," he said. "I went down to St. Pete to see his family and spend some time with them. Tony was a good friend of mine. We spent some time together when we raced in Europe. He worked real hard to get where he was in racing. He signed a big deal with Ganassi and he got killed. Same thing with me, I came to NASCAR and I got k ... I crashed. I guess the good Lord has a storybook up there and apparently my chapter was up. I can do only one thing. I just have to wait."
