NEW SMYRNA BEACH, Fla. — Jeremy Gerstner had no idea what happened.
Only seconds before, he was barreling down the fronstretch at Florida’s New Smyrna Speedway preparing to enter Turn 1 during NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour practice. The next thing he knew, he was sitting inside the remains of his destroyed race car and wondering whether he was paralyzed.
The Tampa, Florida native was not paralyzed by his crash on Feb. 10, 2024. But in the moments after, he couldn’t feel anything below his waist.
“I went to get out of the car, and I couldn’t move my legs,” Gerstner said. “I pulled myself up to the outside of the car and put my head down and started taking my HANS Device off. I wasn’t in tears, but all I could think of was my buddy, Shane Hmiel.
“I raced Silver Crown cars with him back in the day and he flipped over and broke his back, and it paralyzed him from the waist down. I was freaked out; I’m not going to lie.”
Fast forward a year, and Gerstner was back at New Smyrna on Saturday to once again race with the Modified Tour.
The road to that moment was a long one, and it wasn’t easy.
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Gerstner, now 52, never lost consciousness during the crash and remembers everything, including the moments before and after the impact with the Turn 1 wall.
“I came out of Turn 4, and I felt the motor skip a little bit,” Gerstner explained. “I was like, ‘Well, there is no way I could be in the chip.’ By the time I got the start/finish line it (made a noise) like it was misfiring or hitting the chip. When I went to lift after that, the motor was still wide open.
“I was like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ I pulled back as hard as I could on the return pedal … I bent the return pedal 45 degrees the wrong way. I knew at that point I was along for the ride.”
Gerstner said he hit the Turn 1 wall going approximately 150 mph. He added that the impact with the wall was estimated to have been about 35 Gs, meaning approximately 35 times the force of gravity.
“Once I hit the wall, I watched the car fly through the air,” Gerstner recalled. “I saw chain link fence. I actually felt it hook on the retention fence up top and when it did it spun me around and bam, I hit the ground.”
Gerstner’s car was left mangled. The impact was so severe that a wheel was sheared off Gerstner’s No. 55 Modified, flew over the catch fencing and landed outside the track. Luckily, no bystanders were injured as a result.
Emergency medical personal quickly rendered aid to Gerstner. Once they put him in the ambulance and got medication into his system, he began to regain feeling in his legs.
“The second they put me in the ambulance, they put me on propofol,” Gerstner said. “I could feel my legs, and I could wiggle my toes. It was like, relief.”
Gerstner was transported to Halifax Health Medical Center in Daytona Beach, Florida, where he was diagnosed with a pubic rami fracture, a broken left femur and shattered left meniscus.
“I broke my pelvis — they called it a pubic rami fracture — in four different spots,” Gerstner said. “It’s basically like cutting your whole right lower extremity off. That’s why the nerves were pinched, and I couldn’t feel nothing.”
He believes that it wasn’t the impact with the Turn 1 wall that caused most of his injuries, but rather the hard landing and clipping the catch fence.
“Hitting the wall didn’t break my pelvis or my left tibia,” Gerstner said. “What actually broke it was slamming down at 102 mph from a dead drop from hitting the fence. Our seats aren’t designed to save you like that.
“I can’t blame nobody. It was one of those unfortunate deals.”
The cause of the accident itself was a fluke; a one-in-a-million part failure according to Gerstner. The kind of thing that no one, not even the best engineer in the world, could have predicted.
“On that particular day, I hit the chip on the back straightaway. Bumped it a couple of times,” Gerstner said. “I have never hit the chip with the max gear. Coming off the corner, I hit the chip at the start/finish line, which made the motor go about 200 feet in the chip.
“When you do that, it floats the valves because it’s a hydraulic cam type motor. It can’t handle being at 8200 (rpms) that long. I basically killed the motor. When it did that, a piece of the valve guide, when it bent the intake in the exhaust, bounced off the piston and shot up back through the intake.
“It was like the perfect storm. When I lifted, that piece of guide wedged between the rear throttle blade and the carburetor housing. It didn’t matter how hard I pulled back, it wasn’t coming out. When I hit the wall and it revved way up and I bounced off [the wall], the piece came out and it fell down inside the intake.”
NASCAR officials discovered the broken piece of the valve guide inside the intake while inspecting Gerstner’s car after the crash, which confirmed what caused the throttle to hang.
“I probably could have had a better chance of winning the lottery that day,” Gerstner said.
Gerstner spent months confined to a bed while he recovered, and even more months doing physical therapy to regain the strength he lost because of his injuries.
“They said, ‘As long as you behave yourself for four months and lay still, we won’t have to put the pins and all that stuff and the halo around you for your pelvis,’” Gerstner said. “So, I sat in bed for four or five months.”
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Gerstner returned to the seat of a race car for the first time last November when he competed in the North-South Shootout at North Carolina’s Caraway Speedway, but what he really wanted to do was compete with the Modified Tour on Feb. 8 at New Smyrna.
He was determined not to let the bad memories from one season ago stop him from racing at a track he’s raced at for decades.
It was hardly a perfect day for Gerstner on Saturday. He qualified 26th and spun to bring out the first caution on Lap 4 but quickly got his lap back. He would spin again later in the evening on Lap 95 before retiring from the race early due to overheating issues.
Despite not having the race he hoped for, Gestner was thankful.
Thankful to be racing. Thankful to be walking. Thankful to be alive.
“I’m still here to talk about it and race another day,” Gerstner said.
