Rock Island Today

Quad Cities Dispatch/Argus recently issues the following announcement.

After everything that happened to Doug Lenth a couple of decades ago, he is the last guy you would expect to see behind the wheel of a race car right now.

Then, when you consider the other things he has been dealing with the past few years, you really wonder why he would want to do this.

But he’s doing it.

After nearly losing his arm — and his life — in a freakish mishap 20 years ago and after battling Stage 3 prostate cancer for nearly three years, the 49-year-old Colona, Ill., resident went out and won the IMCA Modified feature race on Sunday night at the Bullring at Rock Island County Fairgrounds.

In only his third race of the spring and his first at East Moline, Lenth found himself out in front of everyone else with a few laps to go and managed to fight off Brandon Durbin and Eric Barnes to claim the most satisfying victory of his career.

“I’ve won probably 50 features or better in my life …’’ said Lenth, who was a regular winner at local tracks in the 1990s. “But I tell you, this one is right up there at the top.

“I had all my sons there, all three of them. My whole family was there. With the whole COVID thing going on, there was nobody in the stands, but if you watch the video you can hear those screams. It was pretty awesome, to be honest with you.’’

Lenth took a 19-year break from the racing scene before deciding to get back into it last year.

His sons changed his mind. He has two older sons, ages 28 and 30, who were around to see his victories in the ‘90s but one of them pointed out that Doug's 5-year-old, Caleb, never would have the chance to stand in victory lane and have his photo taken with Dad.

Lenth said that lit a fire in him.

“He said he’d like to be able to have his picture taken with his youngest son and the checkered flag,’’ said Dan Lenth, Doug’s father and part of his pit crew. “He accomplished that last week.’’

The events of May 6, 2000, would have been enough to make anyone quit.

Lenth was leading an open wheel modified heat race that night at the now-defunct Hawkeye Raceway in Blue Grass when the drive shaft on his No. 41 Howe race car broke.

The jagged, severed end of the shaft came rocketing through the floor of the car with the other end still loosely attached to the motor. It corkscrewed through his right arm, breaking both the ulna and the radius in three places, then stripped the clothing from his upper body, tightened the seat belt around his chest, punched a nickel-sized hole in his high-tech Kevlar helmet and ended up protruding from his chest.

Lenth had just changed the ignition switch of the car from the right side to the left a week earlier and that made it possible for him to reach down and turn off the engine, preventing further damage.

As he sat there gasping for air with his father trying to hold together his mangled right arm, paramedics desperately tried to extract him from of the car.

As they tried to cut the seat belt with a knife, they gashed his arm. When they pulled the remnants of the drive shaft from his chest, blood gushed out. Then the battery died on their jaws-of-life device and another driver had to get power tools from the back of his truck to finish the job.

It took more than an hour-and-a-half to get him out.

Lenth underwent six surgeries in five days and spent 21 days in the hospital. Doctors initially told him they would need to amputate his arm but after trying an unconventional procedure called a fasciotomy, in which they allowed the arm to bleed for a week, they were able to save it. He still has four plates and 53 screws in the arm.

Within a week after leaving the hospital, he went back in with flu-like symptoms and doctors discovered he also had broken his sternum. They drained nearly 2 liters of fluid from his heart.

Lenth continued to drive occasionally for a year after that before quitting.

“I just had enough of it,’’ he said. “It just wasn’t the same. I just wanted to get out on the pontoon boat and do some fishing. I never missed it in 19 years. I didn’t miss it a lick. I didn’t have an inkling to drive. I was done with it.’’

But that’s all changed now.

Lenth didn’t have much success when he first got back behind the wheel in the middle of last summer.

“I’ve been sick and this was kind of a last-ditch hurrah for me,’’ he said. “We got back in the ring last year and had some problems. We’ve got a newer car this year and we got out and by god, we picked one off right off the bat.’’

Although the fatigue from the cancer treatments sometimes makes it tough to climb in and out of the car, Lenth is determined to get back to the form he showed in the ‘90s.

“We’re committed to it. I’ve made the investment,’’ he said. “I’ve got some of my old sponsors back and some really great new ones … We’ve got our program pretty much on point this year and obviously it showed …

“We’re going to keep on doing it right up until I can’t do it anymore.’’

Original source can be found here.