Late NASCAR legend Fred Lorenzen is the first driver confirmed to have CTE after battling dementia. His family pledged $1 million toward brain research.
The Hall of Famer from Elmhurst, Illinois, won 26 races, including the 1965 Daytona 500 and had 84 top-ten finishes during his NASCAR career, which spanned from 1958 to 1972.
Fred Lorenzen, nicknamed “The Golden Boy,” died in 2024 at the age of 89, and on Tuesday, his family shared the results of a recent postmortem brain analysis with USA Today.
Fred Lorenzen had been dealing with brain issues for years
Fred Lorenzen’s children, Chris Lorenzen and Amanda Lorenzen-Gardstrom, said that the late NASCAR star had been living with dementia for years before his death.
“It’s overwhelming to get to where we are today,” Lorenzen-Gardstrom said. “There were so many stages of grief, of loss, and not understanding things. It makes me understand why. It doesn’t make anything better at all. But it makes me able to understand why things happened the way they happened.”
In 2016, Lorenzen said that he would donate his brain for study when he passed away. Dale Earnhardt Jr. has also said he intends to donate his brain. Junior believes he sustained about 20 concussions over his nearly 20-year career, one of which almost ended his racing career.
Lorenzen was found to have stage 3 chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) by researchers at the Boston University CTE Center. He is the first former NASCAR driver to receive a CTE diagnosis.
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a degenerative brain disease that progresses over time. It is brought on by recurrent head trauma and concussions, which are frequently observed in athletes who play contact sports and veterans of the armed forces, according to the Mayo Clinic. It causes dementia, brain cell death, and abnormal tau protein buildup.
“My dad struggled for many years, long before he was diagnosed with dementia in his 60s,” his daughter said in a press release. “Watching him go through that, and experiencing the impact it had on me and our family was incredibly difficult and beyond heartbreaking.”
Fred Lorenzen’s CTE diagnosis comes shortly after Darrell Waltrip’s announcement
Fred Lorenzen’s posthumous CTE diagnosis coincidentally occurs less than a month after NASCAR legend Darrell Waltrip’s family announced that he would be withdrawing from public life due to a diagnosis of frontotemporal degeneration, a brain condition that may be “complicated by possible” CTE.
“In my head, it was like, we already know that,” Chris Lorenzen told USA Today. “Just in my opinion, if we’re seeing all these former NFL players with CTE from head injuries, how would NASCAR be any different? This is going high speeds, into a wall, into another car. It’s the same thing.
“I think we know what the results of other drivers donating their brain is going to be. So, the question is, can we somehow help these injured drivers earlier? Because our dad didn’t have any help.”
The Lorenzen family donated $1 million to the foundation
Chris and Amanda donated $1 million to the Concussion & CTE Foundation in memory of their father to advance research and help drivers in need of care. They will use it to establish the Fred Lorenzen Memorial HelpLine.
“The Fred Lorenzen Memorial HelpLine at the Concussion & CTE Foundation is a free, personalized service for current or former auto racing drivers and their families fighting long-term symptoms of concussion, CTE, or related neurological disorders,” the HelpLine website reads.