Millen Looks to the Future : Auto racing: Serious accidents and injures give him something to think about as he works toward getting back on the track.
Steve Millen admits it. He has given some thought to mortality.
After a 23-year racing career in which he has been incredibly lucky--in avoiding accidents as well as reaching victory lane--Millen’s luck has run out the past three years.
Well, maybe not completely out, but the crankcase is leaking.
Millen has been in two terrifying car crashes the past 26 months. After the first, he came back to win the International Motorsports Assn. GTS driver’s championship in a Nissan 300ZX Twin Turbo.
The second crash took place 10 weeks ago in the Atlanta Grand Prix. He still wears the halo brace, the one that stabilizes his broken neck. He also fractured his skull.
When one drives 190 m.p.h. for a living, on-the-job accidents can be pretty nasty.
“It [the brace] doesn’t hurt until they tighten the bolts into your skull,” Millen said from his Newport Beach home. He laughed at the recollection. “But it’s better than the alternative.”
The alternative when you break the C-2 vertebra, the one that controls your breathing, is bleak: “When you have a bad break there,” Millen says, “you’re more than just paralyzed--you’re actually dead.”
Sobering thought, but one that Millen, 42, admits to considering during his recuperation. There’s plenty of time to think. There is daytime, in which he is unable to do much of a physical nature. And there are the nights, when sleep is an unwilling friend.
“I’m so uncomfortable in this thing,” he said. “I can’t get comfortable watching TV or relaxing; you’re tired, but you dread going to bed because you know that all you’re going to do is toss and turn and try to get comfortable because it’s so damn hard trying to get comfortable.”
He has a beard--he has not shaved since the accident--and he has relied on sponge baths because the brace prevents him from showering.
If all goes well and a CAT scan reveals the vertebra is healed, Millen could be out of the halo in two weeks. Then comes the hard part. He will try to repeat the process that took him from the hospital in 1993 to the driver’s championship in 1994.
Under hauntingly similar circumstances, Millen is hoping to match one tragedy-to-triumph performance with another.
*
It’s one of the same vertebrae actor Christopher Reeve broke while competing in an equestrian event. The difference is that Reeve landed on his head and pinched the spinal cord.
“Mine was lucky because I just broke the bone in two places and didn’t damage the spinal cord,” Millen said. “I’ve been fortunate.”
I’ve been fortunate. An amazing statement from a man whose misfortune threatens his career.
Millen has already been through this once.
In 1993 at the Watkins Glen (N.Y.) Raceway, Millen’s car, a Nissan 300ZX Twin Turbo, was sitting sideways on the race track. When it was hit by an oncoming car, it spun like a top. Millen doesn’t remember the impact or the helicopter ride to the hospital. His recollection of the two skull fractures, broken jaw, five broken ribs and his broken arm--snapped completely in two--are vivid, however.
Doctors took a bone graft from his hip and used a steel plate with eight screws to join the arm’s humerus bone together two months after the accident.
For six weeks, his jaw was wired shut.
That got old in a hurry. A liquid diet was not Millen’s idea of eating nutritiously.
“It was kind of funny--I was looking forward to the day I got the wires cut, but after being shut for so long, it takes work, it takes therapy to open your mouth,” Millen said. “Here I was thinking I was having a nice big steak, but instead I had to go home and have some more soup.”
Still, five weeks after the operation on his arm, Millen was back in a race car, testing.
Three months after the operation--five months after the accident--he was winning races again en route to the 1994 driver’s championship.
“It meant an awful lot,” Millen said. “I was in really bad shape in 1993. With the skull injury, there was a lot of nerve damage in my head. For many months, I had no control over my face muscles. I couldn’t smile. I couldn’t close my eyes to try to sleep at night. It was a traumatic thing for my nerves. I was really worried for a long time that I would never race again. To come back and win meant a heck of a lot. . . .
“It’s your goal every year, but championships are very difficult to come by; to win it was especially rewarding.”
He credited his girlfriend, Jodi Dangel, and the others who were around him for the comeback. And he was grateful Nissan stood by him and supported his return to the team in 1994.
“You don’t do these things by yourself,” Millen said.
*
Millen was two-thirds of the way through the race, 300 yards from going into the Road Atlanta pits to turn the Nissan 300 ZX over to teammate Johnny O’Connell. He was at the fastest part of the race course, doing 175 m.p.h., when Fredy Lienhard in a Ferrari--driving in his first IMSA race--hit the right rear fender of the Nissan, sending it into a retaining wall. It was the whiplash that broke Millen’s neck.
Just as he had been in 1993 at Watkins Glen, Millen was leading in the IMSA GTS points race.
He angrily said from his bedside in the days after the accident that it “was in no way a racing ‘accident’--I was just plain knocked off the race track.”
Today, he has softened that stance--a little.
“It shouldn’t have happened. It’s still called an accident, I suppose, but I’m still disgusted about it,” he said. “I don’t think I was bumped on purpose, but through inexperience and incompetence.”
By accident or design, this latest mishap has given rise to knowledge. Millen now knows too well that he is flesh and bone, just like everyone else.
“Certainly, it’s made me think a lot about [injuries],” Millen said. “When you [race] for a lot of years and nothing goes wrong, you think you’re invincible. Two accidents in a short period of time--I don’t think anyone’s really ready for that. You do stop and think.”
He has been through this type of rehabilitation before, and Millen is dreading the work it will take for him to get back into racing shape and build the muscles in his neck again. A neck injury is especially difficult on a race car driver because he is constantly battling G-forces.
“As you get older, it takes you longer to recover. It gets harder,” Millen said “To come back for ’94 was a lot of work. To come back from this will be even harder. That’s the depressing thought about it. There will be a lot of running in the streets to try to get physically fit again, but that’s the challenge--to get to that level of fitness you need to be in order to win again.”
That, in part, inspires him to continue racing.
“I think I dig even deeper when I’ve been hurt,” Millen said. “You’ve got to fight back. I don’t think people realize how very fit you have to be to drive a racing car. You have to get over your injuries and get physically fit again; that’s hard, and the challenge of pushing yourself to do that, and going quick again, is the motivation.
“I’m very motivated--it’s not hard for me to get up in the morning to work hard at whatever I do.”
Working hard is a strong character trait. Millen, a New Zealand native who moved to Orange County in 1982, has enjoyed success at every level he has competed as a professional, from the New Zealand Formula Fords to the Mickey Thompson off-road stadium racing series, to the GTO (now GTS) class.
He is the winningest driver in IMSA GTS history, having won 19 GTS races and 24 pole positions since joining Nissan in 1989; Millen has been especially proficient in even-numbered years, winning off-road championships for Toyota in 1986 and ‘88, and GTS titles for Nissan in ’92 and ’94. He won the Pikes Peak Hillclimb in a Nissan Hardbody in 1989, and was the rookie of the year at LeMans in 1990.
He has taken the axiom about getting whatever you desire in life by working hard and turning it into a lifestyle.
“I think I work harder than most people at staying fit, applying myself and dedication,” Millen said. “A lot of people say they wish they could do what I’m doing--drive fast cars for good teams, get paid well and be successful at it--but they didn’t see the days when I was coming up, trying to get in the business and the sacrifices I made to do what I’m doing today.
“It’s difficult in the ‘90s; there are too many fun things to do, and it’s easy for people to get distracted and not be focused on the things you need to do. You need to be focused for many, many years to get to the position I’m in.”
*
Why, Steve? Why continue to race? You’re not hurting for money. You’ve got your own car customizing and aftermarket parts business, Stillen, and you admit this recovery is going to be more difficult than the last. You don’t need it.
“It’s just a desire,” he says. “You look at it as an outsider and it’s probably pretty damn hard to answer. You can’t replace motor racing with anything. It’s been extremely good to me, and I’ve been blessed to be successful. The day will come when I call it a day, but I don’t know when that’s going to be.”
He is not going to let the most recent accident beat him out of the sport without trying.
“I’m going to come back, work hard to be fit and be strong enough to be competitive again,” Millen said. “If I can’t do that to where I can win, I won’t do it. But if I can, I’m going to give it a go.”
He hopes to compete in the final two races of 1995 and then make a serious run at another title in 1996, tempting fate and luck once more. And by his own reasoning, someone with Millen’s nature and recent past can’t be expected to pack it in so quickly--even under these circumstances. Especially under these circumstances.
“I think both accidents were unusual accidents,” he said. “They were so unusual, they’re not going to happen again.
“There are a lot of people who get knocked down and pick themselves up, so it’s not that unusual for competitive people to do it again, now is it?”
