Fairbury Speedway
With ailing wife, race-life balance wears on Shirley
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt senior writer
Brian Shirley keeps an eye on time trials. (joshjamesartwork.com)
FAIRBURY, Ill. (July 25) — Brian Shirley realized that winning the first of Friday’s four 25-lap semifeatures for the Prairie Dirt Classic at Fairbury Speedway was just a steppingstone to the weekend’s big prize. Yet there he was in victory lane, his voice cracking and tears welling up in his eyes like he had just captured a major event. | RaceWire
The 44-year-old veteran from Chatham, Ill., is known as an emotional guy, but a split-field triumph normally wouldn’t draw such a passionate response from him. On this occasion, though, he simply couldn’t prevent himself from letting loose.
“It’s just a little bit of, like, relief,” Shirley said later in the pit area after returning from a quick trip into town to buy some burgers and fries at Dairy Queen for his crew. “Obviously it wasn’t the PDC, but it’s just a bit of, like, showing you that for all the hard work and s--- you go through, good things do happen. And it’s still a win, so it’s just, you know, a little bit of a breath of fresh air.”
The $5,000 victory was, in fact, just the third of Shirley’s up-and-down 2025 season, following Feb. 28’s unsanctioned score at Springfield (Mo.) Raceway and June 14’s DIRTcar Summer Nationals success at Fairbury. But beyond that, it came in the midst of his wife, Shannon, undergoing taxing chemotherapy treatment in a Chicago hospital for a rare autoimmune disease she’s been battling for most of the past decade.
Shirley said his mind was on his spouse, whom he visited the previous day at Chicago’s Northwestern Memorial Hospital with no racing at Fairbury.
“Yesterday, since we had the day off, I went up there and stayed the night with and came back this morning,” Shirley said. “She went in there before I left for Huset’s (Speedway in Brandon, S.D., for July 17-19’s Silver Dollar Nationals), so I hadn’t seen her since then. She was really surprised because she didn’t know I was coming, so when I walked in the door, obviously it was little emotional.
“She was really happy because, look, you’re up there by yourself for 10 days, or freaking two weeks or whatever it ends up being. It’s not like any of us can run up there every day because it’s Chicago. It’d be different if it was in our (local) hospital — I could run there every day, come home, take care of the family. But you know, she goes up there alone, so sometimes it gets emotional.”
Shannon Shirley is going through the chemotherapy regimen doctors administer every six months since she was diagnosed with Churg–Strauss Syndrome, also known as eosinophilic granulomatosis with polyangiitis (EGPA), in 2015. She was initially hospitalized that year with apparent lung issues before doctors determined she was afflicted with Churg–Strauss, which is characterized by inflammation of small and medium-sized blood vessels affecting various organs.
“Well, that deal never will go away. It’s incurable,” Shirley said of his wife’s disease. “Right now is one of the weeks where she's in chemo for (up to) two weeks. She has to have 10 bags of chemo, which … that just kills her body.”
It’s a draining treatment that requires Shannon to remain hospitalized throughout so she can be closely monitored for potential side effects. The therapy is used in more severe cases of Churg–Strauss like hers to induce remission and reduce relapse rates.
“It’s hard to explain, but it’s kind of like recharging a battery. You know what I mean?” Shirley said of her treatment. “She'll do really, really well (for months), and then like about this time, you’ll tell, like, she starts getting fatigue. The problem with the disease is it's eating her body from the inside out, so physically, she looks, you know, healthy, good looking, but on the inside, she’s probably like, you know, 70 years old.”
Shirley noted that chemotherapy’s “purpose is to kill everything in your body, and she’s getting full on straight liquid chemo straight to her heart because it goes into a port they put in when she was diagnosed.”
“The worst part is, she’s allergic to chemo, so you’re fighting an allergic reaction,” Shirley said. “If the doctors are on top of all the medicine to keep her reaction down, some days you can fly through a (chemo) bag a day. But when she's having trouble fighting it, I mean, she can end up in (the hospital) for, you know, two weeks. It takes 24 hours for the drip of (each) bag so it’s really a time-fluid deal.
“Sometimes she’ll go through it and everything will be fine. And then others, like this time, she’ll be very forgetful, because it’s so rough on her. It’s just a tough, tough deal, but it’s a part of what we have to go through for her.”
The bi-annual chemo treatments have become a bit easier for the entire Shirley family to handle as the couple’s three children have grown older, though there’s still nothing truly easy about the periods Shannon has to spend away while Shirley’s racing career has him traveling or working in the shop on his equipment. Their oldest child, daughter Drue, is almost 18 so she can take on more responsibility helping with the household and her siblings, Brinley, 14, and Briar, 12, but one of the younger kids stays with a family friend “to kind of offset the load” and “we have a lady that comes and helps out with the kids and the house,” Shirley said.
“When it started, it was a really tough thing because our kids were young,” Shirley said. “We had to have nannies and everything. I was gonna quit racing at that time, and then when (doctors) were like, ‘Here, we got a process to hopefully manage (the disease),’ I was able to keep going and we make it all work.”
“But then emotionally … like last week, when I went to Huset’s, it was tough, because I knew my wife and kids were having a tough time, and then it wears on me because I feel like a piece of s--- for leaving them. It’s a tough deal during these times because, when you put it all together, it's hard. Like the kids are sad. When she leaves, they’re upset, and when I leave, they’re upset.”
While Shirley has built some non-racing business pursuits — like a bar and grill in Springfield, Ill., that he opened several years ago — the sport remains his full-time occupation. He said his wife pushes him to continue his racing career amid health struggles, but he sees a future where Shannon’s condition and treatment schedule makes it untenable for him to go on as a racer.
“They do understand this (racing) is a way of life, but at some point in time, for me, it’s like, if my wife told me tomorrow, ‘Enough’s enough,’ you know, I’m done. I mean, there’ll probably be a day. I don’t know when it’ll be, but they’ll be a day that things will be tougher (with Shannon’s treatment) than just every six months.
“When that day comes, don’t be surprised, because it’ll be like, ‘Man, where’d Brian go?’ That's what I'm going to do. I’m really out here (racing) because of her. The day she says, ‘Hey, I can’t handle it no more,’ I mean, I’m going to do what I need to do.”
Not yet, though. Shirley is still a top Dirt Late Model contender driving for Bob Cullen, the Wisconsin team owner whom Shirley first hooked up with right around the time Shannon was diagnosed with Churg–Strauss. And after winning Friday’s semifeature, he’ll be starting among the top four spots in Saturday’s 100-lap, $50,000-to-win Prairie Dirt Classic with a legitimate to win it for the first time in his 15 feature starts in the Fairbury’s marquee event dating back to 2006.
Shirley’s career-best PDC finish is third, in 2010 when the race was still a regional DIRTcar-sanctioned affair contested Labor Day weekend. Since it became a blockbuster World of Outlaws Real American Beer Late Model Series-sanctioned weekend in 2013, his top run is fifth, in 2017, but he owns seven top-10 finishes in 10 feature appearances.
“I feel like there in that first feature, because they worked the track (before the start), we went with the soft tires and I feel like you could abuse the tires,” said Shirley, who overtook Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga., for the lead on lap 14 en route to the 25-lap checkered flag. “And I felt like I did abuse my tires to try and get by (Davenport), so there at the end I felt like I was hanging on a little bit, where if I wouldn’t have had to try so hard, you know, and wear my tires out, I would have been better.
“I did feel like the (Longhorn) ar was OK, but we got to tweak on it a little bit. I mean, obviously, I watched the (other) races and Bobby (Pierce) was really, really good, and Sheppy (Brandon Sheppard) was good and Hudson (O’Neal) too, so, it’s like, we just got to make sure we don’t overthink it and, you know, hopefully we’ll be there at the end.”
