BRYAN BERNHEISEL

over the fence in turn one and down off the edge of the track. In all, the vehicle appeared to completely roll over twice in the air before tumbling down the hill on the other side of the fence coming to rest on all four wheels, out of view of the camera.

“As I was still in the air, and I was seeing dirt, sky, dirt, sky, I felt pain right away in my lower to mid back.

When I came to rest, I immediately popped my belts loose to relieve the pressure. I didn’t lose consciousness, but I was a little rattled. Immediately a track official came over and asked if I was okay, and I said my back hurt. That was their signal to tell me to stay right where I was, they were going to cut me out of the car,” Bernheisel said.

“I mean I was ready to climb out of the car. I had my gloves off, my helmet off and everything. Knowing what I know now about my neck, I probably shouldn’t have done that, but my neck didn’t hurt. So, they cut me out of the car and took me on a back board to the hospital.”

At this point the seriousness of his injuries weren’t clear. Bryan was joking with the nurses, thinking he was going to be sore for a little while, but he’d be back at it soon enough. Besides his back hurting, his arm hurt as well from striking something in the car during the roll over. To him, he didn’t think anything was broken, just bruised and a little shaken up.

“They do the xrays and MRIs and it takes some time for those results, so they plopped me in a room and by that time my wife shows up and has the video of the wreck. She shows it to me, and at that point I’m still in pretty good spirits,” Bernheisel recalled. “Then the doctor came in. He said, ‘here’s your xrays, your neck is broken, here,

BRYAN BERNHEISEL’S WRECK here and here. We need to stabilize you and you’re probably going to need surgery.’ Immediately, my spirits just plummeted”

Bernheisel’s wreck from March 26, 2021 is available to see on dirtvision.com. The video is the full night of racing, so jump to the 1:05:00 mark to see the wreck.

The fears associated with being told his neck was broken were heavy.

“I wasn’t even thinking about racing again at that point,” Bryan continued. “I was thinking about whether this was going to affect my life, you know, was

Use the URL or the QR code below with your smart phone camera. https://www.dirtvision.com/videos/arch-night-williams-grove-speedway

I going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. Like, how bad is this whole thing going to be? I was in shock with the news. This was serious, and it started to sink in just how serious that first night. After the xrays were done, they put me in a full torso brace to stabilize everything. The wreck was Friday night, all the xrays and everything were into the wee hours of Saturday morning, and the earliest they could schedule the surgery was Sunday morning. It was a lot of time to think about it.”

The road to recovery was going to be a long one. The doctors gave Bernheisel the prognosis that it would take roughly 6 months to recover from the injury. Surgery was optional, but if things didn’t heal properly without an immediate surgery, in 6 months they may have to do surgery anyway, and it could be more complicated then. So, Bryan opted for the surgery, which fortunately went well. He then had the grueling task of keeping his neck immobilized and recuperating.

“For the first two months, I was either in bed, or in the recliner in a full torso brace that kept my head and neck completely immobile,” Bryan recalls. “And that was tough. Our lives are typically really busy. So, to go from running all over to wearing out Netflix in a recliner at the drop of a hat, that is a really big change. I needed help doing everything, and that was a very difficult thing to come to grips with. There were some dark days for me early on.”

Almost immediately after the wreck and as he struggled along the road to recovery, there came an out-pouring of well-wishing from family, friends, fellow racers and fans.

“I probably have a mountain of cards that came in,” Bryan said. “I can’t even begin to say thank you to all the folks who sent a card or checked in on me over those months to try to keep my spirits up. Of course, my wife and family were really supportive through the whole ordeal.”

After a few months, the torso brace came off and a neck brace remained, but due to lack of use, some of Bernheisel’s upper body muscles had atrophied and it took time to regain the strength and range of motion he’d been used to prior to the wreck.

“At the six-month mark I got the neck brace off, and even though I was weak, I got cleared by the doctor. The hardware they’d put in was good, the neck was stabilized so have at it,” Bryan recalled.

It was shortly after getting cleared to go back to work, that Bryan embarked on a new project with his brother and father at the shop. They’d had the idea of building a new prototype late model chassis that would improve upon what they had, making it safer, stronger and faster.

“We’d all had ideas on what we’d wanted to do,” Bryan said. “We all had notes and sheets of paper and all, so we sat down, put everything together on what we wanted to build and we decided now was the time to do it.”

Much of the design work fell to Bryan as the new prototype was developed. They built the car and decided to take it out at the end of 2021. Bryan ran in a race in Bedford, PA at the end of October to just get back behind the wheel and get things worked out. The big test was in early November at The Dirt Track at Charlotte in Concord, North Carolina.

“That was big for me. Because here I am, just the second time out after the wreck and injury, and I’m still not really confident and on top of it, we were running a completely new car,” Bernheisel said. “But we ran really well.

I qualified for the feature, and that was a big thing. Even though we were able to do that, I still didn’t feel one hundred percent comfortable.”

In the off season, Bryan and the team at Lazer Chassis continued to dial in the new chassis and get it ready for production and as he continued to grow stronger, the confidence returned.

“I don’t really know what happened over the winter, but I felt a lot more confident coming into this season,” Bryan said. “I don’t know if it was a level of preparedness or what. We had built a second car, so we had two ready to go. But that first night out, I felt really comfortable. I felt like I had raced the week before, but I hadn’t. I’d had a full winter season off, only a couple of races at the tail of 2021, and of course months and months of recovery with no racing. So, it still doesn’t make a lot of sense to me why I felt so good going into that first race at Selinsgrove, but I did.”

The first feature that Bryan raced in for the 2022 season was at Selinsgrove Speedway, a half-mile track, located practically along the path of the Susquehanna River, north of Harrisburg, PA. It was a Saturday night race on the second day of April, 2022. It was the start of a new season, he was driving a newly designed car, was just over a year after a catastrophic wreck and here he was, Bryan Bernheisel heading out to race.

“We had actually planned on hitting a couple of other tracks before that night and at least practicing,” Bryan recalled. “But with the way the weather turned out, we didn’t get to race, we didn’t get to practice. That Saturday night we went right into racing.”

On that early April night, Bernheisel took the checkered flag in first place, scoring a win in his first race of the season. It was a triumph that really made him feel like he was back.

“The car ran great, I was able to get to victory lane, it was really a great night for us,” Bryan said.

The hard work and determination paid off as the Lazer Chassis team continued to pull data from the car over the course of subsequent races, making tweaks along the way so as to be sure that the prototype was going to not only work but be an improvement over the previous builds.

The 2022 season has had its share of ups and downs for Bryan as he’s gotten back into the groove of racing. There were a couple of DNFs and a few tail of the field finishes. But there were some bright spots as well. Besides that week one victory, scored three additional top-five finishes including another win at Selinsgrove in late July.

Bryan plans on wrapping up the 2022 season at Selinsgrove and Bedford Speedways and then he will head down to The Dirt Track at Charlotte for the World of Outlaws World Finals to put the new car up against even tougher competition.

2021 was a rough year for Bryan and the Bernheisel family. Bryan’s journey was difficult, but through the help of friends, family and the racing community he was able to heal up and return to the sport he loves, and even excel at it.

Going forward, Bernheisel plans to continue to advance, proving that the new car is a solid platform on which to launch a championship campaign, and that he’s fully back and ready to resume taking his career to new heights.