While LeBron James and the Miami Heat were experiencing the over 90 degree temperatures in Game One of the NBA playoffs at the AT&T Center, some of the stars of NASCAR, including six-time champion Jimmie Johnson, Matt Kenseth and Carl Edwards were also describing their own experiences with high temperatures, an issue that they often face as they race throughout the summer months.
The driver of the No. 48 Lowe’s/Kobalt Tools Chevrolet had a similar experience as LeBron James, where he actually suffered full body cramping.
“Yeah, there have been plenty of those moments in a Cup car with the summer months,” Johnson said. “There was a race at Indy, maybe three or four years ago, something like that, and it was just brutally hot. Homestead seems to shock everybody when we get down there. I guess we have had some fall events and then you get reminded that it’s still summer down in Florida.”
“My worst experience by far was in a Grand-Am car at Daytona in July,” Johnson continued. “I can’t remember the year exactly, but I did the six-hour event in July with Beau Riley, and Marc Goossens was my teammate. We were in the No. 91 car.”
“I think I qualified the car; we had practice, qualified, then Cup practice and a whole bunch going on, then a six-hour race,” Johnson said. “I got behind on hydration and didn’t keep up while I was in the car. I had an electrical problem that took out the drink system in the car. I had to pit maybe 10 minutes before it was time because I couldn’t push the brake pedal hard enough to get it stopped. I missed the chicane on the backstretch. I came to pit road. I got out of the car. Of course tried to get cooled down and have some fluids.”
“About an hour later, I started cramping and I actually went into a full body cramp and was stranded inside my motorhome lying on the floor,” Johnson said. “I wish I had a picture of what I looked like. I mean I’m telling you every muscle in my body locked up. I could barely get to my phone, which was on the table. I knocked it off and then I don’t know if you have ever had a cramp, but try dialing a phone with everything like it is.”
“(Jeff) Gordon was next door in his motorhome and I called him and he didn’t answer,” Johnson continued. “When he didn’t answer, I didn’t know what I was going to do. Then shortly thereafter he called back.”
“I just started yelling at him to get over here,” Johnson said. “As he came in my bus it took him about two or three minutes to stop laughing at me. Then he got me to the Care Center and three IV bags later, I felt like myself again.”
“That was a very tough experience for me. I didn’t cramp in the car itself; but after, it got me bad. That was a tough one.”
NASCAR Sprint Cup point’s leader Matt Kenseth also experienced significant heat issues and dehydration as well. In fact, he even experienced some burns from the heat for which he still bears the scars.
“Well, early in my NASCAR career, the insulation wasn’t nearly as good in the car so you were a lot more fatigued and uncomfortable in there,” Kenseth, driver of the No. 20 Dollar General Toyota, said. “You didn’t have air conditioning in there. The environment was a lot worse than when I started.”
“Some of our early races, I had some real hot ones and in 1999 in Charlotte in the fall race, it got really, really hot,” Kenseth continued. “That’s the only time I got dehydrated in the car. I didn’t feel good and all that.”
“I learned a lot about my body and about making the cars better,” Kenseth said. “Since that day, I’ve never had that happen again. But there have been some hot ones.”
“The first Nationwide race was really hot and I burned my heel the size of a fifty cent piece and that never really healed after that,” Kenseth continued. “It was like getting bad frostbite and your fingers are always messed up. My heel has been messed up since that first one. I remember getting big blisters on my heels because it was so hot.”
Carl Edwards, driver of the No. 99 Kellogg’s/Cheez-It Ford, experienced some heat early in his career, but in his case, it was because his race truck was actually on fire.
“The heat that shocked me the most though was my first NASCAR stock car race, a truck race at Memphis,” Edwards said. “Mike Mittler let me drive his truck there and I remember at one point then threw the caution and I couldn’t see what it was for and then I realized I was on fire and they were throwing the caution because my truck was on fire.”
“It was so hot.”
“That was my first Ricky Bobby moment,” Edwards said. “It is hard to describe.”
Edwards admitted that he has had other heat issues, other than being on fire.
“Driving these race cars on a hot day, especially if you don’t have the seat right and don’t have the blowers in the right place, it is extremely hot,” Edwards continued. “Even now, I don’t think of it much anymore, but at Dover during the race I was lifting my heels off the floor on the straightaway because it was burning my heels. Everybody does that all the time but the first few times you realize, ‘Wow, I think my heel is burning’. You don’t realize everything in the car is that hot.”
“Those guys back in the day without the fans and ducts, those were some men. That is tough. It had to be really, really hot.”
Edwards admitted, however, that not only has he been able to tolerate the heat but he has actually come to enjoy the challenge of the high temperatures in the race car.
“I don’t think it has ever gotten any better, it is just that you get used to the heat,” Edwards said. “I don’t know if there are physiological things that happen or if it is all psychological.”
“As far as heat is concerned, I have learned to enjoy it,” Edwards continued. “It is kind of fun when it gets really hard and that becomes part of the race that you have to overcome, part of the difficulty.”
“I look forward to the hot days.”
