Inside Dirt Late Model Racing
Column: Injured WISSOTA racer back on feet
Wearing a smile on his face bright enough to light neighborhoods, Laine Schwehr walked through the doors of the Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital in Lincoln, Neb., on Wednesday morning and settled into a vehicle with his parents. He was headed home to Valley City, N.D.
This was a moment that neither the 28-year-old Dirt Late Model racer, nor anyone else, thought would be possible in the initial aftermath of a frightening crash he rode out on Sept. 20 during qualifying for the WISSOTA-sanctioned Stock Car Stampede at Jamestown (N.D.) Speedway. His life seemed to have been altered forever from a broken neck and compressed spinal cord that he had suffered in the wreck and left him with almost no movement or feeling in his body.
“I was kind of just laying there trying to figure out what was next,” Schwehr said Monday evening, recalling the helplessness and uncertainty he experienced while being treated at a hospital in Fargo, N.D. “The doctor, I could kind of tell he was trying to figure out how to tell me what was going on, and I just told him, ‘Don't sugarcoat it. Just say what it is.’ And he's like, ‘Well, yeah, you’re quadriplegic, paralyzed from the chest down. I don't think you'll ever walk again and you could be lucky to get the use of your arms.’
“At that point I could pick my hands up off my chest about a half-inch and that was all I had. My mom says when I was in the hospital room, I was laying there and I was like, I could move my eyes, and that was it.”
But exactly one month later, on Oct. 21, Schwehr was walking again without human assistance, albeit gingerly and behind a walker. And just over two weeks later he was discharged at least three weeks earlier than expected to continue his recovery in his own apartment in North Dakota.
It was a miraculous rebound for the preternaturally positive Schwehr — and one that he plans to cap by eventually returning to the cockpit of a race car to compete again.
“I mean we’ll get back to it. That’s the goal,” Schwehr said. “I don’t have any doubt in my mind that I’ll get back behind the wheel of a car and act like (the accident and injury) never happened.”
Schwehr asserted that he loves the sport too much to let this episode, however scary it was, end his racing career. After all, he feels like he was just getting started.
“I kind of got a late start,” said Schwehr, who remembers attending races as a kid with his mother at the old half-mile Red River Valley Speedway in West Fargo, N.D., but didn’t become a driver until after graduating from high school. “My parents were just like, ‘If you're going to do it, you’re going to fund it yourself.’ So I kind of couldn’t do it till I thought I could afford to, and I got that rude awakening right away. I realized it was going to take a whole lot more than I thought it was.”
Schwehr, who makes his living as a truck driver alongside his father hauling cattle and livestock feed ingredients and grain fertilizer, spent five years campaigning an open-wheel modified at tracks in North Dakota and nearby states. After he rolled his modified in August of 2022, he decided to heed the advice of a good friend and move to the Dirt Late Model division. He bought a decade-old Rocket Chassis from South Dakota racer Kyle Jensen and, after waiting on parts for a WISSOTA-rules engine, debuted in the full-fender class in June 2023.
While Schwehr didn’t intend to run the old car very long, it became his ride throughout the past three seasons as he focused on weekly WISSOTA competition at area tracks and traveled to Northern LateModel Association events. In August he paid for a more up-to-date Rocket XR1 Chassis from a friend’s uncle — a machine he believes Troy Schill of Grand Forks, N.D., had bought from former World of Outlaws Real American Beer Late Model Series champion Rick Eckert of York, Pa. — and picked it up two weeks before his accident.
Schwehr considered entering his new car in Jamestown’s Stampede weekend, but he opted to stick with old reliable for his last handful of outings in 2025. It appeared to be a good call as he flashed speed in jumping out to the lead in his Saturday heat race at the track, but then disaster struck.
“We got pushed back a day (with qualifying) from weather, and honestly, I don’t know if it’s a racetrack any of us should have ever decided to go race on, but we did anyways,” Schwehr. “Heavy, rough, just one of those tracks where you know it when you watch it, like something’s going to happen to somebody. You just don’t know who or when. You just get that feeling. You’ve been around it so much, you just know.
“It was no fault of the racetrack, the promoters or anybody else. I mean, we’re all race car drivers. We know what we’re doing, and we go and do it.”
Digging into the soft clay entering turn three, Schwehr’s car was sent into a wild series of flips.
“I’ve got the video of it and stuff and I still try to make sense of why it did it,” Schwehr said. “You know how Late Models are — the second they come up, if they get any air under them, they just toss. So it was kind of like you had to snap it so hard into (turn) three to get it turned and then drive across all the rough instead of being hooked into the rut, trying not to hook it with the right-rear. And it’s just like when it bit on the right-rear, it got up on the rear tire on its own, kind of just walked itself over, almost like a sprint car, and just tossed the thing.
“I flew upside down for a good ways before it hit the ground. It hit on the driver’s window and it barrel-rolled a little bit, then it kind of just tossed it up in the air and cartwheeled and then went end-over-end and landed on the roof.
“I was conscious through the whole thing — that was pretty wild,” he continued. “I opened my eyes in the middle of flipping and I thought it was done. Everything was quiet. It was dead still. I didn’t know what was going on so I figured it was done, and I opened my eyes and I was still looking down at the racetrack with the nose of the car touching the ground.”
When Schwehr’s car came to rest upside down, he initially “thought I was fine, like we always do, you know?” he said. “You flipped the car before and it’s not a big deal. You just kind of figure you’re going to get flipped over and get out and act like nothing ever happened.”
It took some time for Schwehr to grasp his injuries.
“My best friend for quite a while, he races a Midwest modified and he was racing over there, he ran out on the racetrack himself because he said it just looked bad,” Schwehr said. “Then he was the first person I saw, and he crawled underneath the car to make sure I was alive because nobody had said anything. And I guess I was joking around with him asking him if it looked cool.
“Once the EMTs and everybody had got over there, I was kind of just getting anxious, getting tired of hanging upside down. So then I was complaining about, like, my shoulders were kind of sore and tingly, and my arms were tingly, but I’d been upside down for awhile so I just figure all the blood’s at the top of my body right now and it’s just normal, you know?
“Then one of the EMTs — and from racing there forever, I knew everybody — she come over and asked me if I could move my feet, and that’s when stuff got pretty serious,” he added. “I realized I couldn’t and it was going to be a really long night.”
Schwehr had suffered neck and back injuries from the awkward manner his car had crashed down onto the track.
“It was just the unlucky way it hit right on the driver’s window,” Schwehr said. “It flipped over and it flew upside down for 25, 30 feet before it even touched the ground, and it hit right in the window. Like the car was rolled just perfect to hit right on the window and it just shoved everything to the right. So I guess I didn’t realize it at the time, but when they started cutting the car apart (after carefully righting the car) they had to cut the cage around my head because it was sitting on my head.
“From pictures I’ve seen, the seat’s kind of twisted in there and the cage is all wrapped around the seat and everything else. A friend of mine told me that the car is just basically bent around the seat. Like, it looks like the seat stayed right where it was, but it just bent the car around it. There was nothing other than just the perfect circumstance (impact) for it to do that. I don’t think any car built would have not shoved over.”
Schwehr was transported by ambulance to Jamestown Regional Medical Center for preliminary examinations and tests.
“When I got there I was still moving my hands and my arms a little bit and wiggling my toes, stuff like that,” Schwehr said. “I definitely was struggling to feel a lot of stuff, didn’t have a whole lot of sensation. I went in for CT (scan) and they told me I’d broke my neck, the C5 vertebra. They already had a helicopter they’d called when I was at the racetrack before they took me to the hospital first, so then they flew me to Fargo” and a larger hospital.
“They got me off the helicopter (in Fargo) right away, and it was just into vitals, all that stuff, to IVs right away. After they did CT (scans), MRI, all that stuff, they figured out that I had compressed my spinal cord, a C5 injury, and they went straight into assessment on feeling. When they start your face is like the baseline, I guess, and they kind of compare everything to that. They got about, well, between my neck and probably about 4 inches below my neck, and I had no feeling from there down. Like, absolutely none.”
Schwehr was scheduled for surgery Sunday morning. With him at the hospital was his mother, who flew with him in the helicopter; his brother, who lives in Fargo near the hospital; and his father and sister, who drove over together.
“They came and got me at about 7:30 in the morning and told me they were going to get me prepped,” Schwehr said. “I talked to my surgeon and he kind of told me what they were going to do and that they were going to remove the vertebra out of my neck and put in this spacer and do a fusion, which they thought they were going to do from would’ve been C3 to T2, so from higher in my neck down to basically the base of my shoulders.
“(The surgeon) said he was going to get me back to whatever he could and couldn’t promise me anything, but to be hopeful. When I came out of surgery, I guess he called my dad — I had two different neurosurgeons, so the one that told me I would never walk again was not the one that did my surgery — and said that I would make a full recovery, which I had not heard at this point at all.”
The positive news buoyed Schwehr, who soon began to notice improvement.
“The first week was just in the ICU and pretty rough, but I was starting to get a little bit of movement back at the end of that first week,” he said. “I think I’d like wiggled my fingers or something, and my brother had said I’d coughed or something at one point and I had put myself in a fetal position and I didn’t realize that I did it.
“So then through that next week in Fargo, the second week, I just started getting more and more feeling and movement back. The first time I remember wiggling in my toes, I looked at my mom and I said, ‘I’ll walk again. I don’t care. I will.’
“Then you’re getting something new back every day, even sometimes two, three times through the day, because the (spinal) swelling was going down and stuff like that. You would just get all sorts of little new motor functions and stuff back. It was pretty cool to see. By the time I left Fargo (by helicopter on Oct. 6 for therapy at Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital), my hands were were starting to come around — well, my left hand was, my right hand was still pretty stupid, I would say, it wouldn’t really do a whole lot. But I was being able to like move my legs, kick my legs, pick my feet up off the bed, wiggle my toes a little bit.
Intensive physical therapy for three hours a day in Nebraska included sessions in which Schwehr was on his feet walking on a treadmill using slings and minimal body weight support. The big moment came Oct. 21 when he walked unassisted.
“I was so overwhelmed with everything at the time,” Schwehr said when asked about his emotions when he began walking by himself. “Like, I didn’t get to sit there and really think about it. I was just up just doing it.
“And the first few steps are really awkward. I equate this to like being a newborn starting to walk and you’re getting to experience it like with full awareness this time. The walking deal right away was just … it was almost weird. I didn't know how to explain it to anybody. Like, walking without full feeling in your legs is kind of … it’s just a different deal.
“I couldn’t believe I could do it again even though I told myself I would, and I was kind of hard on myself that I couldn’t do more at the same time. But then every day, you see something. Maybe not so much now you're not seeing some big improvement day-to-day, but week-to-week is huge. Something new you can do or how much more you can endure stuff.”
After spending the last week focused on walking without the walker, Schwehr progressed to the point where he was “past all their expectations and basically everything I can do here now I can do as an outpatient at home.” On Wednesday he lived up to his pledge to his therapists that he would walk out of the hospital and not even think about sitting in a wheelchair ever again.
“My therapist said, ‘When you go home, your adaptive equipment you’re going to need is going to be …’ and they put a wheelchair on the list,” Schwehr said. “I said, ‘You can take that off right now because I won’t need it. And if you send one with me, I won’t use it. There will be zero part of me being in a wheelchair. I haven’t been back in my wheelchair in two weeks. It’s sitting in a corner of my room right now and I don’t know why it’s still here.”
Schwehr acknowledged, though, that he’s far from being back to normal.
“Physical therapy has been a lot of strength and coordination stuff, balance, and then just a lot of a lot of walking around,” said Schwehr, a bachelor who lost about 35 pounds in the first two weeks after the accident. “We’ve been working on it. I can do it. It’s not pretty, and it’s not good. It’s very crude looking. It’s like watching a 1-year-old learning how to walk, I guess. Like it’s just short-stepping, not really letting yourself stand all the way up. My balance is still probably the most affected thing, so trusting yourself that you can do it is pretty difficult.
“Getting back to my independence is my biggest thing right now and everything after that will just be what I can do, when I can do it. They’re OK with me going back as an independent individual. I go back to living by myself and taking care of myself.”
As far as driving — a street car, not a Dirt Late Model — Schwehr said doctors told him he can begin doing that again once he’s cleared to remove the neck collar he’s wearing. He has a follow-up appointment set for a couple weeks and hopes a closer look at his post-surgery healing will reveal the collar isn’t needed anymore.
“I’m hoping by spring I can get back (driving) the truck,” Schwehr said. “I want to get through the winter, get all my therapy stuff done and hopefully be in a really good place in the spring to get back to work would be my priority.
“All my friends, you know, I get the question, ‘Well, when are you coming back racing? When are you going to get back in the car? When are you putting the other car together?’ I’m like, I got to go back to work first. It’s going to look pretty bad if I go back racing before I go back to work.
“Everybody’s been really supportive of me racing again,” he continued. “Well, my mom's not so supportive of me going back racing, but she’s a mom. She finally got to where she just has been able to accept it the last few years, that it just is what it is, and usually when something happens, everybody’s all right … and then this happened, so she’s of course concerned.”
Nevertheless, Schwehr can see that day he races again looking ever clearer. His spirits have been kept high by so many people rallying around him — whether with words of encouragement or fund-raising to assist him during his recovery — that he’s committed to resuming life as he knew it both off and on the track.
“I’ve always been the guy that, like, I just want to stay under the radar, I don’t want a ton of attention,” Schwehr said. “It’s just been, like, I kind of do my own thing, come and go as I please, and you never really think about how big your circle is or how far that branches out. Then something like this happens and all my friends that are more like family, you know, take over and do all this stuff I would never ask for. Like they’re all doing pass-the-helmet stuff at the races and fundraising and doing whatever. It’s been overwhelming, but in the best way possible. You see the best in people with this deal.
“It’s just interesting to see different sides of people come out that you just don’t expect, like their softer side or how easy they can get shook up by something. Like Brad Seng (the veteran Dirt Late Model standout from Grand Forks, N.D.) is probably one of the biggest ones that come to mind with that. I think a lot of that guy, and he’s treated me very well since I got into the Late Model deal and kind of took me under his wing a little bit, and he’s been so worried about how this was going to get handled right away and how my progression was going to be.
“He called me a couple weeks ago when he saw the video of me walking and had to ask if it was AI or not. Then he’s like, ‘Well, what’s your next step? Like, what’s your plans?’ I said, ‘I’m just trying to get home and get back to work, and then we’ll go from there.’ He said, ‘Well, you’re not thinking about getting back in the (race) car again, are you?’ I was like, ‘Well, that’s my plan. Like, if I can do it safely, I’m going to.’
“And he just stopped and he’s just like, ‘I don't know why you would do that.’ I’m like, ‘Well, Brad, if you were 28 years old and otherwise healthy and in this situation, you’d do it, too.’ ”
Indeed, Schwehr’s desire to race still burns. Sometime next year he hopes sliding around in a Dirt Late Model becomes another milestone in his amazing recovery.
Ten things worth mentioning
1. Schwehr’s time at the Madonna Rehabilitation Center in Lincoln, Neb., put him close to the University of Nebraska, so he saw how rabid the locals are about Nebraska Cornhuskers football. But he had his eyes on other sporting events while there. He noted that on one October Saturday while “the nurses and everybody were busy watching the football,” Schwehr was “just sitting here watching Eldora” and the FloRacing live stream of the Dirt Track World Championship.
2. Watching streams of Dirt Late Model races has kept Schwehr busy during his recovery. He has plans to spend his first weekend home in nearly two months doing the same. “My buddy Greg’s already asking if I’m going to come sit over at the house and watch the World Finals (at the Dirt Track at Charlotte in Concord, N.C.) this week so can log into my DIRTVision,” Schwehr said with a laugh.
3. While Schwehr’s racing has been limited to his native North Dakota and bordering states, he’s hoping that a return to competition will eventually include a trip to the famed Eldora oval in Rossburg, Ohio. “We talked this year that we were going to go over and run with the Steel Blocks (during the DTWC weekend) if everything was going good,” he said. “You don’t see any WISSOTA guys go over there (for the undercard event), but why not? All our rules are the same for the most part other than you gotta change tires. I think it’d be cool to get over that way.”
4. River Cities Speedway in Grand Forks, N.D., is one of the tracks that Schwehr has frequented for both the modified and Dirt Late Model action — it’s a few hours from home — so I asked him for his thoughts on the quarter-mile oval that I consider among my favorite tracks in the country. He’s a fan of the place as well. “It’s slowed down even from the first couple times I raced there in the Midwest modified stuff to now,” he said. “I mean, they’ve reshaped it and changed it so much, but it’s still a blast. I still love going up there. Like, it’s elbows up, it’s fast. You don’t have any time to sit and relax. You got to go all the time.”
5. It’s really not a surprise considering Tim McCreadie’s strong six-victory season on the World of Outlaws Real American Beer Late Model Series, but he recently confirmed in a Facebook post that he’ll continue racing for the Briggs Transport team in 2026. He enters this weekend’s three-race World Finals sitting fourth in the tour’s standings but with a shot at a third-place finish as he trails Ryan Gustin of Marshalltown, Iowa, by 50 points. Conversely, a poor weekend could drop T-Mac as far as sixth in the standings with Brian Shirley of Chatham, Ill., and Dennis Erb Jr. of Carpentersville, Ill., who are tied for fifth, within striking distance at 52 points behind him.
6. Donald Bradsher of Burlington, N.C., who fielded the Paylor Motorsports entries McCreadie drove from 2020 through early ’24, is planning a return to the cockpit during the World Finals. The 61-year-old will be behind the wheel of the black Hoopaugh Grading Company-sponsored Longhorn Chassis that his current driver, Carson Ferguson of Lincolnton, N.C., debuted at September’s World 100 as he ends a four-year absence from action. His last start came on July 31, 2021, in at Crate Late Model at Wythe Raceway in Rural Retreat, Va., while his last Super Late Model appearances were in October 2020 WoO shows at Cherokee Speedway in Gaffney, S.C., and 411 Motor Speedway in Seymour, Tenn. “I’ve done some testing here and there the past few years but haven’t made any competitive laps for quite a while,” Bradsher said in a press release. “I’m looking forward to it, but I’m not doing it for myself. It’s more for my daughters and my young grandkids. Regardless of how we do on the track, they will have some awesome memories and photos to look back on and that’s what really matters.”
7. I always keep my eye out for social media posts of Dirt Late Model personalities in Halloween costumes around the holiday and I’ll say Bobby Pierce of Oakwood, Ill., and his fiancee, Abby Foster, came up with a good joint idea for a party they attended. Pierce dressed as The Ghoul, the central character in the Fallout television series about a once-famous Hollywood actor named Cooper Howard who was transformed into a disfigured bounty hunter following an apocalyptic nuclear exchange. Foster, meanwhile, was Lucy McLane, the heroine of the Fallout series who forms an uneasy alliance with the Ghoul.
8. Another solid Halloween costume: Lucas Oil Series champion Devin Moran’s brother, Wylie, joined his wife Jordan, sister Savannah and Devin’s crewman Dillon Kline dressing up as the legendary rock band KISS. Wylie said his wife designed all the costumes and was helped by Wylie’s mother Brenda to do the trademark KISS face makeup. The quartet entered a costume contest at a local bar where Wylie’s brother, Brodie, works and they were voted the winners. The prize for best costume? A seven-day trip to Florida.
9. One racing couple I always have to mention at Halloween time is North Carolina racer Willie Milliken and his wife Crystal, who come up with creative costumes every year for their annual Halloween party at their race team’s shop. This year they Ricky and Carly Bobby from the film "Talladega Nights."
10. The trailer from the upcoming movie Christy, starring Sydney Sweeney as former professional boxer Christy Martin, offered an interesting clip of a wedge-bodied Dirt Late Model at speed. Some scenes for the film were shot at Carolina Speedway in Gastonia, N.C., with Mike Huey turning laps in his Late Model.
