[Bored5000]

I believe I have written this on here before, but I have been a huge dirt-track racing fan all my life. That is my first racing love. My parents began taking me to dirt-track races when I was only a couple months old. As a result, I see lots of dirt-track Sprint Car, Late Model and Modified races each season.

I have shared the information with a couple other posters on here in the form of PMs, but Sprint Car driver Harli White is just an amazing story and worth checking out for anyone with even a passing interest in racing.

White is now 21 years old and races 360 cubic inch Sprint Cars on the American Sprint Car Series (ASCS) national tour. In her first race, as a 12-year-old in 2008, she flipped her Micro Sprint and was burned over 50 percent of her body. The only reason she didn't die in the inferno that engulfed her car was that fellow racer Donnie Ray Crawford saw that track officials had emptied their hand-held fire extinguishers as the fire still raged. Crawford got out of his car and pulled White out of her burning car.

Crawford was then subsequently murdered a little over three years later when his mentally unstable grandfather shot him in the family home.

White's story is just incredible. When none of the hospitals local to the Oklahoma City area could adequately treat the severe burns she suffered, the Shriners Children's Hospital of Galveston (Texas) agreed to treat her. She went through six months of skin grafts and therapy to treat her burns. Even several years after the accident, she has had to undergo subsequent surgeries since skin grafts do not naturally stretch as a person grows the way a person's normal skin does.

There have been lots of drivers who have suffered devastating injuries in a racecar over the years, be it burns or paralysis or loss of limbs, but those drivers were almost universally grown men who knew the risks for which they were signing up. not a 12-year-old girl.

White's story is terrible in all kinds of ways: Her Micro Sprint did not have a fuel bladder to contain the fuel when the car's fuel cell ruptured. Over fifty years ago, NASCAR superstar Fireball Roberts died for the same reason. Such an inferno should not have happened in the year 2008. White was also wearing a normal, cotton T-shirt under her racing uniform instead of fire-retardant Nomex clothing. The safety standards at the Micro track she was racing at were substandard. Track officially were not wearing fire-retardant uniforms, so they were powerless to go into the fire and pull her to safety when their hand-held fire extinguishers were empty. Just the basics of a 12-year-old racing a Micro Sprint makes me cringe.

But how does she come back from such awful injuries in her first race to race again, especially on a national Sprint Car tour.