Slinger Speedway veteran Conrad Morgan battles back from his worst wreck

WAUKESHA – Conrad Morgan has driven since the 1960s.

Driven a lot. Trucks, paving equipment, you name it.

And race cars. Plenty of race cars.

Morgan has taken the green flag thousands of times, collected hundreds of trophies, claimed about a dozen track championships and come close to many more.

He has wrecked his share, too. Just never the way he did last June 12 at Slinger Speedway.

What was supposed to be a celebration of Morgan’s 50th season instead lasted just six weeks before yielding to months of pain, a recovery that may never be complete and lingering questions about how much of a 51st year there really will be.

“Just driving down the road last summer, driving down the freeway, I’d get queasy about being around trucks or between a truck and a wall … just things that never bothered me before,” the 68-year-old Morgan said.

“I don’t know for sure if it’s because of my age or because of the way I hit, but I have never had the issues that I had last summer.

“You’re not supposed to make any important decisions in your life after you bang your head, but … I went months that I couldn’t make decisions.”

June passed … July … part of August. Morgan would feel that flutter, that uncertainty.

He wanted to race, sure. That’s just what he’d always done. But he’d cracked his sternum and fractured a vertebra and knew his head wasn’t right.

Nonetheless, as the end of the 2016 Slinger Speedway season approached, Morgan had recovered enough to want to see how he felt in his rebuilt car. Two and a half months after his accident, he went to the track again, not to race but to see if he could drive fast again.

“I did about 80 laps and I was fine,” said Morgan, a six-time track champion. “But the minute everybody else got there and I went out with the other cars I wasn’t comfortable.”

Healing would continue. Racing could wait.

Morgan felt much better during a private session two weeks ago. The first real test was supposed to have come Sunday, before a rainout pushed the opener back by a week.

“Maybe it’ll be a 10-lap race and I’m done. Or it could be the whole day and I’ll decide I can’t do it,” Morgan said. “But right now, I don’t believe that’ll be the case.”

Morgan, a native of Hillsboro, 35 miles west of Wisconsin Dells, moved to the Waukesha area with his family when he was in the third grade and followed an uncle, Dale Morgan, into racing.

As he branched out beyond Jefferson Speedway to tracks in the Dells, Kaukauna and the Madison area, Morgan made friends with the who’s who of Wisconsin stock-car racing, drivers such as Johnny Ziegler and Dave Watson, central Wisconsin greats Marv Marzofka and Jim Back, and Wisconsin Rapids’ Dick Trickle, who is in every conversation about the best asphalt short-track racers of all time.

Morgan ran more than 50 races a year at his peak, including 1990 when he commuted 16 hours each way for Saturday nights at Concord (N.C.) Speedway. He won the Slinger title and finished second in the Concord Big 10 Series.

“After you’d get home from Slinger after driving all night Saturday night, it made it pretty tough going to work,” said Morgan, an operations manager at Wolf Paving, where he has worked since 1967.

“I decided that wasn’t worth it. Had to go racing or go to work, and I was making a heck of a lot more money at work than I was racing.”

He slowly scaled back in recent years to only race at Slinger. Don’t doubt Morgan’s competitiveness, though. A week before his crash last season Morgan finished second and a week before that he won the feature.

With all the racing Morgan has done, crashing was a given.

An oil slick at Madison sent him into the wall and left him with no memory of going to work the next day. Morgan spent two nights in a Rockford hospital another time when he hit where another car had dislodged a protective barrier. And he broke an elbow at Slinger — he’s still not sure how — a long time ago.

Last year’s wreck, though, was different.

Morgan was trying to pass on the outside when the car beneath him slipped up in Turn 3 and bumped the left rear of Morgan’s car, just barely, but that’s all it takes to break traction.

As Morgan tried to correct, the other car caught his left front. That abruptly turned Morgan head-on into the wall in Turn 4, an impact that lifted his car 3 feet off the ground and then slammed it back down.

“I remember going into Turn 3. I don’t remember anything after that until I woke up in Froedtert,” Morgan said of the Milwaukee hospital where he spent three days after his wife, Lisa, insisted he go.

Morgan spent 50 days with a two-part brace protecting his chest and back like a turtle’s shell. Headaches lasted into January — seemingly chased by a nasty bout with the flu, of all things — and the right side of his neck still doesn’t feel right.

In addition to the trophies in the shop behind his home, Morgan has kept his steering wheel, which is bent by 4 or 5 inches where his hands held it.

And he noticed while replacing his safety harness that the old shoulder belts had stretched by 2½ inches.

“I hadn’t been in the car since the wreck,” Morgan said. “After I changed the harnesses I got in the car and loosened the harnesses by 2½ inches to see where that would put me. And it didn’t put me in a good place.

“I’m pretty sure my head hit the roll bar by the mirror, and I think that’s what — for lack of a better phrase — knocked the marbles out of the circle.”

Given his age, Morgan isn’t sure how many years of racing he’d have left even without his latest crash.

He doesn’t dwell on the risks despite reminders from his wife and crew and friends who care. But he also doesn’t know if he can perform the way he did in his 10th year, his 30th year or his 50th.

“The thing is, I can’t quit like that,” Morgan said.

“I can’t quit because I got hurt in a car accident. I can’t quit that way. I’ve got to quit saying, I’m done, I can’t do this anymore.”