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Ballou overcomes serious injuries for Eldora win

There have been some great comebacks in USAC racing history: Mel Kenyon from near-fatal burns in a 1965 IndyCar race at Langhorne, Pennsylvania, Lee Kunzman from a broken neck and burns in a 1970 sprint-car race in Odessa, Missouri, and Pancho Carter from crippling injuries during an IndyCar test crash in 1977 at Phoenix.

And you can now add Robert Ballou's name to that distinguished list.
Ballou broke his neck and back last Labor Day in a sprint-car accident at Calistoga, California, and last Saturday night he was standing in Victory Lane at Eldora Speedway.

"Just getting back in a sprinter was kind of a victory because it's been a long road and I'm lucky I didn't die," the 28-year-old Californian said during a lunch break Monday at his full-time job at H & R Industries in Kokomo.

"But to do it at Eldora is pretty special because I love that place."

After hearing his story, it's amazing the 2015 USAC sprint champion isn't paralyzed. He landed on his head – literally – back in September and walked to the ambulance.

"The first hospital they took me to said they couldn't help me and sent me to the Santa Rosa trauma center," he recalled. "Then I was airlifted to Stanford and I was there for four days.

"They put me in a brace from my belly button to the back of my head and told me I'd be racing again in eight weeks."

But Ballou kept feeling a tingling feeling in his fingers, so he flew to Indianapolis, where his pal and former racer Tyce Carlson got him an appointment to see Dr. David Schwartz.

"Dr. Schwartz said I should have had surgery the night it happened so he wheeled me in on Oct. 7 and spent three hours fixing things," said Ballou, who learned his C7 had exploded, his C2 was fractured and there was a compression fracture of the T8 vertebra. "He said it would take awhile but I'd be as good as new.

"I'd bought a house right before I got hurt, and not being able to work for 21 weeks really put me in a bind. I got cleared to drive by USAC a couple weeks ago but all I had was a bare frame in my shop and no money."

What he did have was a loyal friend and helper, Derrick Bye, who works full-time at Crossroads Engineering and helps Ballou in the evenings.

"We worked every night last week until 1 a.m. and headed for Eldora on Friday and barely made it to hot laps," he continued. "I was a little rusty and we were trying to figure out our new Eagle chassis. I should have probably won on Friday but I was too conservative. And that's never worked in a sprint car."

Eldora is a ballsy place and it takes a special breed to ride the fence and search for the cushion. But it's made for Ballou. Starting fourth in Saturday's 30-lap feature, he had a spirited duel with Chris Windom before finally breaking away to score his fifth USAC win on the legendary half-mile.

"We had a late restart with five laps to go and usually you're a sitting duck to a slide job but I managed to hang on," he said.

It's easy to picture Ballou in the '60s going down the road with Herk, Parnelli, McCluskey, Rutherford and Foyt. He's a little rough around the edges and a total throttle psycho who always says what's on his mind.

He was driving Monday morning on his day job when the phone rang; it was Eldora owner Tony Stewart.

"Tony has a bunch of banners on the wall that say, 'the house that Earl built,'" Ballou explained, referring to Eldora founder Earl Baltes. "But I got on the PA system and said it wasn't that house that Earl built but it was close because it's my house.

"Tony asked me why I would say something like that and I said, hell I don't know, a guy shoved a [microphone] in my face and I said something that pissed people off, you know what that's like. We had a good laugh about that."

He may not own it, but Ballou and Eldora are back in stride – just like his career

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