RIP, Fred Lorenzen: NASCAR Star Who Changed the Sport Forever

If you are at all a NASCAR fan, likely you’re aware that Hall of Fame driver Fred Lorenzen died last week. Possibly you read the statement issued by NASCAR Chairman and CEO Jim France: “Fred Lorenzen was one of NASCAR’s first true superstars. A fan favorite, he helped NASCAR expand from its original roots. Fred was the picture-perfect NASCAR star, helping to bring the sport to the silver screen, which further grew NASCAR’s popularity during its early years.”

By “silver screen,” I can only guess that France is talking about the 1968 film Speed Lovers, a B-movie which actually stars Lorenzen, top-billed in the advertising as “The Nation’s Top Stock Car Racer.” It’s about a driver who falls in with gangsters trying to fix a race. Says a review on Amazon: “This poorly written and directed pic would interest no one who is not into 1960’s NASCAR racing (like I am). The best acting was done by stock car driver Fred Lorenzen, who played himself.” According to IMDb, Lorenzen was in three other movies, including I Love You, I Love You Not, in which Lorenzen plays a character named Fingers, but only Speed Lovers is about racing.

Of course, all that was a long time ago, though Lorenzen’s importance to NASCAR is undeniable. Coming from Chicago, he was among the first NASCAR winners who didn’t speak with a southern accent. Nicknamed “The Golden Boy” for his blonde hair and good looks, Lorenzen helped advance NASCAR beyond its hayseed perception and into a legitimate, national sport.

Before he was Hagerty’s “Barn Find Hunter,” Tom Cotter was a pioneer in motorsports public relations, particularly for NASCAR. He co-wrote a book about Holman-Moody, Ford’s legendary race team, for which Lorenzen drove. And as part of the research for that book, Cotter came to know Lorenzen.

The first thing you need to know about Fred Lorenzen is that he was a businessman. “Until Fred, no one in NASCAR had made more than $100,000 in a single season,” Cotter recalled. “He told me that when he got out of a car, he’d kiss the queen and take the trophy and smile, and then he’d go straight to a pay phone and call his broker about how to invest the money he just won.”

Lorenzen’s emergence into racing was the story of NASCAR back then: Start out at your local track, and work your way up until somebody notices you. “Fred told me about one of the first events he ran in, a demolition derby,” Cotter said. “He took the [vulnerable] radiator out of the front of the car, and bolted it in the back, and then he filled the trunk with concrete. He won.

“Then he borrowed money from the Chicago mafia to buy his first race car, from a guy who owned a pizza place as a front. Fred counted on winning the money back. It was touch and go there for a while because he wasn’t doing so well, and the mafia was breathing down his neck.”

Lorenzen’s mostly regional racing caught the attention of Ralph Moody, one of the founders of Holman-Moody. “Ralph had seen Lorenzen race, and thought there was something special about the kid, and he brought him to the south,” Cotter said. Lorenzen was signed in late 1960, for the ’61 season. It was the only time he would move away from the Chicago suburbs.

Lorenzen had made abbreviated runs at NASCAR in 1956, at age 21, and again in 1960, competing in a handful of races in his own car, first with a Chevrolet, then with a Ford. Aside from a third-place finish in the Daytona Firecracker 250, he didn’t have much success.

But the allure of NASCAR was powerful. This is from an interview with a local newspaper in 1960: “Since stock cars are the type of racing I know the most about, and since NASCAR’s prize monies are the highest anywhere, I made my change. Up to now, however, I must admit that I had begun wondering if I had made the right move and if I was actually good enough for NASCAR.”

Back then, winning the season championship didn’t mean that much; if you wanted it, you’d have to attend most all of the races. In 1961, for instance, there were 52 of them. Ned Jarrett won the championship that year, but he had to race in 46 events to earn enough points. Jarret only won one race; Lorenzen won three in just 15 races. He learned early on to cherry-pick the events that paid the most money.

You’d think his talent would lead to a long career in NASCAR, but you’d be wrong. In 1961, Lorenzen began winning races for Holman-Moody and Ford, and didn’t stop until 1967, when he walked away. He made a half-hearted attempt at a comeback in some scattered races in 1970-72, but never won again.

There were multiple reasons he quit. Twice voted NASCAR’s most popular driver, Lorenzen had nothing left to prove; out of just 111 races with Holman-Moody, he had won 26 times, including the Daytona 500 and twice at the World 600 in Charlotte, plus wins at Darlington, Bristol, Atlanta, Martinsville and North Wilkesboro, and that was in 1964 alone. Lorenzen had ulcers, and he hated living out of a suitcase.

Also, it was not lost on Lorenzen that in ’64, his friends Fireball Roberts, and 1962 and 1963 NASCAR champion Joe Weatherly were killed, as well as Dave McDonald and Eddie Sachs in the Indianapolis 500.

Besides, investing the $496,572 he’d won in his NASCAR career gave the Lorenzen family all they’d need, which Lorenzen padded with a second career, selling real estate. “He sold a lot of houses in the Chicago area, and many of his customers never knew he was a race car driver,” Cotter said. “He was a really, really good salesman. He was one of RE/MAX’s top guys.”

There’s evidence though, that he missed racing. In 1987, Cotter was working with the annual NASCAR Media Tour in Charlotte, and he assembled a panel that highlighted Holman-Moody’s remarkable history. He rounded up Ralph Moody, Bobby Allison, Wendell Scott—”people who were directly, or indirectly, associated with Holman-Moody,” Cotter said.

He wanted to bring in Lorenzen and Dan Gurney, but they were hard gets. Two months before the event, Lorenzen gave Cotter a tentative yes. Lorenzen “had promised people for years that he would come back down to NASCAR territory,” Cotter said, “but it hurt him too much to come down. He left NASCAR way too quickly, and he left a lot of money on the table.” But Lorenzen said he’d come, and with that, Cotter called Gurney. “He said, ‘If Fred’s coming, I’m coming.’ But Fred became wishy-washy, on the fence. I called Fred two hours before his flight, and he said, ‘Yeah, I think I can make it.’ But the whole NASCAR world told me that he wouldn’t be at the airport.” Traveling, of course, was one of the reasons Lorenzen said he quit racing.

“But I went to the Piedmont Airlines gate, and here comes this guy with blonde hair and a yellow sweater,” Cotter said. “It was Fred. We had like five amazing days together.” Cotter even put his star-studded panel on a bus and they visited Dale Earnhardt’s shop. “Watching Earnhardt and Gurney and Fred together, talking racing—it was a magical moment.”

After Lorenzen returned home, his daughter, Amanda Gardstrom, called Cotter. “She said, ‘My father was so excited to be part of that. Thanks so much for inviting him.’”

Thus begins my small part in this story. In 2013, Gardstrom contacted me after asking Trish Yunick, Smokey Yunick’s daughter, how to find me. Gardstrom had read a story I did for Car and Driver in 2008 about the life, and subsequent mental decline, of NASCAR Daytona 500 winner Lee Roy Yarbrough, and she thought I might get a story out of visiting with Fred Lorenzen. I did, but it wasn’t what you’d expect.

You may recall that in 2013, the NFL was abuzz with talk of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, widely believed to be caused by repeated head impacts, and linked to the suicides of NFL stars Junior Seau and others. The most famous case of CTE was that of former NFL player Aaron Hernandez, who in 2012 was accused of killing three people. Two years into his jail sentence, he was found hanging in his cell. His brain was donated to science, where it was determined he had the worst case of CTE ever seen for his age.

CTE is untreatable. It can only be detected after you die. Says Wikipedia: “First-stage symptoms of CTE are confusion, disorientation, dizziness, and headaches. Second-stage symptoms include memory loss, social instability, impulsive behavior, and poor judgment. Third and fourth stages include progressive dementia, movement disorders, hypomimia, speech impediments, sensory processing disorder, tremors, vertigo, deafness, depression and suicidality.” CTE was headline news when the NFL settled a lawsuit with retired players for $765 million.

Looking at the evidence, it seems almost certain that Lee Roy Yarbrough, who suffered some awful head impacts in crashes—and who later tried to kill his mother, and died in a mental institution—suffered from CTE. But nobody knew what it was back then, and car owner Junior Johnson tried hard to find out what was wrong with Yarbrough. “I probably spent $100,000 trying to get Lee Roy diagnosed,” Johnson told me, “but they could never agree on what he had.” The unofficial cover story was that he caught Rocky Mountain spotted fever after a tick bite.

Gardstrom thought her father had CTE, a result of some hard crashes of his own.

So I traveled to Chicago, near the town where Fred Lorenzen was born, and who now lived there in an assisted living facility. I met Gardstrom at the door.

Lorenzen, 78 at the time of my visit, was still in his fifties when the symptoms started, according to Gardstrom. She first noticed something was wrong at her wedding in Mexico. “Dad didn’t understand he was giving me away the next day. It was the beginning of something heartbreaking.” Two years later, while he was in Daytona for the 50th anniversary of the 500, a hotel clerk called Lorenzen’s room and asked him to bring down his credit card. “He didn’t know where he was, why he was there, or how he had gotten there,” Gardstrom said.

They saw doctors, who eventually diagnosed some form of dementia, but Gardstrom felt her father’s symptoms—memory impairment, emotional instability, erratic behavior, depression, and impulse-control issues—didn’t match those of the familiar types, like Alzheimer’s.

She began researching dementia and found Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. She met Chris Nowinski, a former Harvard football player and WWE wrestler who was forced to retire from wrestling in 2003 after multiple concussions. He made the study of brain disease his career, earned a PhD, and was often the point man for the center’s “Brain Bank,” which collects brain tissue and spinal material from deceased athletes who displayed symptoms of CTE.

“I’m very familiar with Fred Lorenzen’s case,” Nowinski told me. “And I think there’s a strong possibility he suffers from CTE.”

So I wrote the story, but Car and Driver wasn’t interested. I took it to Road & Track, where an aggressive young editor-in-chief jumped on it. That would be Larry Webster, who is now my boss here at Hagerty.

After the story ran, the New York Times suddenly discovered the possible auto-racing link to CTE. And in 2016, Dale Earnhardt, Jr. announced that he would leave his brain for science, specifically for study of CTE. He suffered multiple concussions, and missed races as a result. “Anything I can do to help others,” he said at the time. “It was something I didn’t have to ask myself whether I wanted to do it or not.”

Gardstrom was moved. She published an open letter to Earnhardt on her Facebook page, thanking him. “If only we had the knowledge back then of head injuries, my dad would be sitting with me in good health today, playing with his grandbabies and living happily at home,” Gardstrom wrote. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart for standing up and doing this. You’re making a difference for your later life and hopefully for NASCAR.”

Gardstrom asked her father about donating his brain for CTE research. She said in an interview: “Not too recently I talked to my dad just a little bit about what I kind of think is going on, ‘Would you ever want to donate your brain?’” Gardstrom said. “My dad surprises me all the time. He just looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, for sure, if it helps someone.’”

That day in 2013, I got to spend an hour with Fred Lorenzen. He was having one of his “pretty good days,” Gardstrom said.

This was the ending for that R&T story: “His eyes still light up when he speaks of his Daytona 500 win. And then there’s the question everyone asks: ‘Could you still get out there today and mix it up with them, Fred?’ We get the standard answer. ‘In a minute,’ he replies, blue eyes brighter than ever. Then they fade.

“Lorenzen has no complaints. ‘The book has been written,’ he tells his daughter. She is less satisfied. ‘If Dad had the knowledge then that we have now, he’d rewrite the book to be enjoying his golden years with the very thing he retired early for: his family. That’s what you have left, long after the racing is over.’”

Fred Lorenzen was 89.