You may not have any idea who Jason Leffler is. But when I found out yesterday morning that he was killed, albeit doing what he loved, my heart broke.
Leffler was a car racer, aged 37, with a wife (now ex-wife I’m told) and 5-year old son. He raced for NASCAR and while he wasn’t one of the top marquee names he certainly had a following and the respect of his fellow racers. I wrote about meeting him, Kyle Busch and David Reutimann in a previous blog post.
While a feeding frenzy surrounded Kyle, Jason was content to hang back and observe after he was interviewed. He was standing at one of those tall tables under a tent and I popped over thinking I’d get to say Hi before he moved away, tired of dealing with media. But I kept my recorder off and my camera away and just chatted him up, person to person. He was a warm, nice man. He talked about how his son, 3 at the time, loved to watch NASCAR races, especially Sprint Cup – not the division in which Jason was racing at the time. He was in the Nationwide series.
“But his favourite racer is Dad?”
“No!” laughed Jason. “He cheers for Carl Edwards, even in Nationwide!”
We talked for about 10 or 15 minutes about his life and how much he loved to race and then they needed him to go test his car on the track. He shook my hand and off he went. I felt like I’d had a few minutes of “real” time with a guy who’s used to turning it on for the camera. I’d met a really decent man who just loved a dangerous sport.
Jason’s nickname was LEFturn. He was in a heat race on a dirt track on Wednesday night when he wrecked and was killed.
People make fun of NASCAR. “How hard is it to just keep turning left?” they ask. That’s because they’re delightfully ignorant of the subtleties of the sport. Drivers are in incredibly good physical shape and the coordination between their spotters, their crew chiefs and them is second-to-second. Driving in such close proximity to each other is a whole new game when you’re moving at 200 MPH. It’s like anything – once you realize the skill that goes into it, you can respect it. Flipping past it on TV doesn’t give you the whole story. These guys know how dangerous it can be, despite all of the precautions NASCAR takes to keep them safe. But it really doesn’t make it any easier to hear that a 37-year old father of a 5-year-old is never going home.