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Another Healing Process for Millen : A Second Crash Means a Second Rehabilitation and a Second Chance to Come Back and Win

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Steve Millen admits he has given some thought to his mortality.

After a 23-year auto racing career during which he has been incredibly fortunate in avoiding accidents as well as winning--Millen’s luck has changed.

Millen has been in two terrifying sports car crashes in the last 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 occurred April 30 at Road Atlanta in Braselton, Ga. Millen still wears a halo brace to stabilize his broken neck. He also suffered a fractured skull.

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When one drives 190 m.p.h. for a living, on-the-job accidents can be pretty nasty.

“[The brace] doesn’t hurt until they tighten the bolts into your skull,” Millen, a New Zealand native, 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, you’re more than just paralyzed--you’re actually dead,” Millen said.

Millen, 42, has ample time for such thoughts. There is daytime, when he is physically unable to do much. And there are the nights, when sleep is an unwilling friend.

“I’m so uncomfortable in this thing,” he said of the halo brace. “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.”

If all goes well and a CAT scan reveals the vertebra is healed, Millen could be out of the halo in two weeks. Then he will try to repeat the process that took him from the hospital in 1993 to the driver’s championship in 1994.

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Under hauntingly similar circumstances, Millen hopes to match one tragedy-to-triumph performance with another.

In 1993 at the Watkins Glen Raceway in New York, Millen’s car was stopped sideways on the 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--are vivid.

Doctors took a bone graft from his hip and used a steel plate with eight screws to rejoin the broken bone of his upper arm 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 gracious dining.

“It was kind of funny,” Millen said. “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. 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. . . .

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“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 other friends for the comeback.

“You don’t do these things by yourself,” Millen said.

Ten weeks ago, Millen was 300 yards from going into the Road Atlanta pits to turn his car 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 Millen’s right rear fender, sending the car into a retaining wall. The whiplash 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 hospital bed that it “was in no way a racing ‘accident’--I was just plain knocked off the racetrack.”

Today, he has softened that stance--a little.

“It shouldn’t have happened,” he said. “It’s still called an accident, I suppose, but I’m still disgusted about it. I don’t think I was bumped on purpose, but through inexperience and incompetence.”

Having been through this type of rehabilitation before, Millen is dreading the work it will take to get back into racing shape, building the muscles in his neck again. A neck injury is especially difficult on a race car driver because he is constantly fighting G-forces.

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“As you get older, it takes you longer to recover,” he said. “It gets harder. 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.”

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