The Friday morning after Kevin Underhill crashed, I returned to the Driveway auto racetrack around 7 A.M. The track’s owner, Bill Dollahite, greeted me. How was I doing, he asked.
I had already told Bill that we’d had to transport Underhill to the hospital the previous night. It was important for the venue owner to know that there had been a serious crash, because he might need to speak with local media outlets about the incident. But Bill had already seen the blood on the race course. A car club would be using the track at 9 A.M., Bill reminded me. We needed to have the venue cleaned up and prepared for their arrival.
It was August 14, 2009, near the end of my first full eight-month season as the promoter and race director of the Driveway Series, a Thursday night road bike race at the far end of east Austin. I dumped PA cables, extension cords, and other equipment out of five-gallon buckets I’d been using as storage. I found a scrub brush and some Dawn dish soap, and went down to the tree-lined section of the track. I carried one bucket of clean water, one of soapy water.
I scrubbed the track for the next hour and a half, trying to get the blood stain out. I understood that the group of people Bill was hosting were paying for a premium experience. One of the members in the car club was a doctor from Austin’s Brackenridge Hospital, where we’d transported Underhill the previous evening. The doctor had finished a long overnight shift. We began to talk.
“Is Kevin going to be okay?” I asked. Because of medical privacy rules, the doctor couldn’t say much. He just told me, “I know you probably want to go home, but you should really go back to the hospital.”
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