Former Daytona 500 winner Fred Lorenzen, who died in 2024 at the age of 89, has been posthumously diagnosed with CTE.
The Boston University CTE Center diagnosed him with Stage 3 chronic traumatic encephalopathy, making him the first known NASCAR driver linked to the brain disease associated with repeated head impacts.
Lorenzen’s family shared the results of the recent postmortem brain analysis with USA Today for an article published on Tuesday.
His children, Chris Lorenzen and Amanda Lorenzen-Gardstrom, said their father spent his final years living in a nursing home and showing signs of dementia.
“It’s overwhelming to get to where we are today,” Lorenzen-Gardstrom said. “There were so many stages of grief, of loss and not understanding things. It makes me understand why. It doesn’t make anything better at all, but it makes me able to understand why things happened the way they happened.”
CTE has been more closely connected to head injuries suffered by football players or participants in other contact sports, but Lorenzen’s son was not surprised by the diagnosis.
“In my head, it was like, we already know that,” Chris Lorenzen said. “Just in my opinion, if we’re seeing all these former NFL players with CTE from head injuries, how would NASCAR be any different? This is going high speeds, into a wall, into another car. It’s the same thing.
“I think we know what the results of other drivers donating their brain is going to be. So, the question is, can we somehow help these injured drivers earlier? Because our dad didn’t have any help.”
NASCAR did not respond to USA Today’s request for a comment.
Lorenzen won 26 races between 1956 and 1967, including the 1965 Daytona 500.
