After a bad wreck on Valentine’s Day, it didn’t look likely Danny Creeden would race any time soon. Yet, he defied odds, earning an emotional win at the Short Track Super Series stop at Bedford Speedway last Sunday.
In February, during the Super DIRTcar Series portion of the DIRTcar Nationals at Volusia Speedway Park, Creeden hopped wheels another car’s. That sent his modified backwards into the wall, flipping it over and landing upside down.
“It knocked me out cold,” Creeden, of Middletown, New York, said. “It took me awhile to come to. I don’t remember anything of the crash. I had to watch videos.”
Creeden took a trip to the hospital with a lengthy list of injuries: a concussion, bruised ribs, bruised lungs, a hematoma on the left knee and a bruised hip. He credits his safety equipment for preventing worse injury. Creeden sat in a Kirkey full-containment seat with a five-point harness. Creeden wore a Simpson Shark carbon-fiber helmet paired with a Simpson Hybrid head-and-neck restraint. And he drove a chassis from Bicknell Racing Products.
“Everything held up well during the crash,” Creeden said. “The cage just had a dent, and I replaced the helmet afterwards just to be sure.”
Creeden, however, wasn’t as easy to repair.
“The neurologist told me to take three months off from racing,” Creeden said. “I took about 30 days off. I was hurt bad, but the urge to race again overcame the pain I was in.”
Creeden returned to racing on March 22 for the Short Track Super Series race at Bridgeport Motorsports Park. There he finished 17th, conceding the night of racing was tough on his body.
At Bedford, he fared better. Dillon Steuer led every lap but the last one, popping a tire on the final lap. Creeden and Danny Bouc inherited the front of the field, where the two dueled to the finish.
“I beat Danny in turn one, and then he had a big run on the backstretch,” Creeden said. “I went into three and four waiting for the slide job. Then our cars made contact.”
Bouc did a hot lap around the track after the checkered flag flew, tapping Creeden in the rear. The confrontation didn’t stop there, with Bouc sticking his head in Creeden’s cockpit at the scales.
“I shook it all off,” Creeden said. “There was a lot to celebrate in victory lane. A win this early in the season sets the stage for the rest of the year. It was a big comeback after what happened in Florida.”
Mike Adaskaveg has written hundreds of stories since the website’s inception. This year marks his 54th year of covering auto racing. Adaskaveg got his start working for track photographer Lloyd Burnham at Connecticut’s Stafford Motor Speedway in 1970. Since then, he’s been a columnist, writer, and photographer, in racing and in mainstream media, for several outlets, including the Journal Inquirer, Boston Herald, Stock Car Racing, and Speedway Illustrated. Among Adaskaveg’s many awards are the 1992 Eastern Motorsport Press Association (EMPA) Ace Lane Photographer of the Year and the 2019 National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) George Cunningham Writer of the Year.
