LEGEND HAD CTE
Fred Lorenzen lived '35 years of constant heartbreak'
NASCAR
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."
One of NASCAR's first superstars
By the time Chris and Amanda were born, their father had retired from NASCAR 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."
