Medical care was not the highest of priorities in NASCAR even as late as the early 1980s. Facilities were scattered at best and largely not equipped to handle emergencies. It was then that Alabama-based Bobby Lewis, MD, DMD, entered the picture with an offer to develop a medical system that would care for injuries sustained during events.
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Lewis installed temporary hospitals for each race on every race track with the help of trained nurses and emergency-care physicians. Five decades later, those make-do setups have transformed into state-of-the-art permanent facilities at tracks across the country and go by the name of “Infield Care Center.” Every time a driver is involved in a crash, as minor as it is, they’re required to go to the center and get checked out.
So, what happens there? Dale Earnhardt Jr. elaborated in a 2023 episode of Dale Jr. Download. The layouts of the centers are more or less the same. The generic horse-shoe desk is in the middle. Gurneys divided by curtains. White-robed professionals walk around with pads and pens. What fills the room with energy are angry drivers and doctors trying to treat them.
“I’m not sure exactly what their roles are, but there will be a lead neurosurgeon, and possibly a lead doctor,” Dale Jr. said (5:45). “There’ll be a guy in there to possibly check you for a concussion, in the room. But there’ll also be a physician to manage any kind of breaks or any kind of severe wound or whatever you might have.”
He added that the physicians are filled with questions about the wreck. This isn’t something that every driver is fond of. Emotions run high in the center with hopes of a good result just being destroyed. But at the end of the day, the questions are just to figure out the right course of treatment and the drivers know this.
They release the drivers after performing a complete head-to-toe check and determining that their physical condition is good enough to be hounded by the media waiting outside. On-track injuries are only a fraction of the cases that the infield care center handles during a given weekend.
It is open 24 hours a day throughout the weekend and is available to every driver, crew member, and fan whatever their need is. In certain venues like the Talladega Superspeedway, all this is free of cost. Quite possibly, the only thing that hasn’t been done at an infield care center is delivering a baby. But the professionals there are prepared for that as well.
