GREENVILLE, S.C. – Last Sunday, 6-year-old Keelan Harvick ran across the racing surface at Michigan International Speedway to claim the checkered flag after his father, Kevin Harvick, won the Consumers Energy 400.
Keelan then enjoyed a victory ride with his father in the No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing Ford.
Three days later, another young boy, unable to run, got behind the wheel of the No. 38 Front Row Motorsports Ford— with an assist from driver David Ragan.
But 5-year-old Wyatt Banks, who woke up one morning with his legs inexplicably paralyzed, wasn’t at a race track. He was an integral part of Ragan’s appearance on Wednesday at the Shriners Hospital for Children, where Wyatt receives treatment.
And for Wyatt, sitting in Ragan’s show car with the Shriners Hospital paint scheme the driver will run this weekend at Bristol Motor Speedway, the thrill was no less intense.
For Ragan, the association with the Shriners Hospitals is as sincere and committed as it gets. Ragan became a Shriner in 2012 after joining a Masonic lodge in Cornelius, North Carolina.
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“I’ve got a secret handshake, but I can’t tell you,” Ragan quipped.
To date, he has visited roughly half the 22 Shriners Hospitals in the United States. The visit to the Greenville hospital was his second there.
“I’m fortunate to have a dream job,” Ragan said. “I get to drive race cars for a living. Like any job, I have my good days and bad days, so it’s easy to get stressed out over a performance, or certain part failures or mistakes that I make on the race track.
“But at the end of the day, I still have the full movement of my body. I’m healthy. I don’t have any ailments that keep me down. So I’m able to go out and live a fulfilled life. There are some kids who don’t have that potential. So it’s my way of giving back to the local community and serving one another.”
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Wyatt will get a taste of real, big-time racing when he visits Bristol this weekend as Ragan’s guest. So will Trana Pittam, director of public relations for the Shriners Hospital in Greenville, who will be attending her first NASCAR race.
Pittam was quick to underscore the importance of Ragan’s visit to the facility.
“It’s incredible to have someone who’s such a supporter, and who has such a platform to be able to reach so many people and let everybody know about the mission of the Shriners and the lives that can be changed by the care that we offered,” said Pittam, who emphasized that no child will ever be turned away from the hospital for lack of money.
On their visit to Bristol, both she and Wyatt may have the opportunity to see some familiar technology. The Optical Scanning Station used for inspection at NASCAR tracks is similar in concept to a scanning system used at the hospital in Greenville.
“As kids grow, and they have a prosthetic limb, or they have some type of spinal cord injury where they can’t walk correctly, they’re always needing adjustment as they get older, as their bones grow and as they grow as a kid,” Ragan said. “That’s something that, every six months or every year, they’ve got to be back at the hospital getting adjusted. So that prosthetic leg that a young kid has today, it’s obsolete six months from now.
“They have basically a white-light scanning room that has pressure points in the floor, and it has digital cameras all around the room. A kid walks back and forth, about 15 to 20 yards, and it has a system that’s checking the pressure and the way that his feet are bouncing, compressing the floor. It creates a digital file that shows that he’s moving a certain way. It can pick up alignment on his spine, so they know that the right leg needs a quarter of an inch of adjustment, or your left leg needs this, or your back brace needs this much of a degree of an adjustment.”
Like the Optical Scanning Station, the hospital’s system uses contact points on a patient’s body, as opposed to points on the body of a car.
“The kids get in there, and it’s like a laser show,” Ragan said. “So they have a 3D image that’s on file, and as the kid grows, that image continues to change. They can go to a CNC machine that they have here, and they can spit out a new prosthetic leg or a new brace.
“The technology that we have in the NASCAR, it’s all over the world that we live in. So that’s one way they use a scanning system here, much like we scan our race cars.”
At the hospital, though, there’s no potential pitfall to the scanning process.
“I don’t think there’s an inspection process, and nobody’s getting fined for failing,” Ragan said with a laugh.
