BLIND GEORGIA RACER SEEKS 225-MPH LAND SPEED RECORD

Despite the devastation of losing his sight in a severe drag racing accident five years ago, Dan Parker refuses to give up his love of speed and competition. “I’m not a blind man who wants to go racing,” he declares. “I’m a racer who just happened to go blind.”

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Within months of his life-changing crash, the 2005 American Drag Racing League Pro Nitrous World Champion began personally constructing a three-wheeled cycle car powered by a single-cylinder engine that he eventually drove at the famed Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.

“It was August of 2014 and I set an official speed record for the 50 to 85 cc cycle car—and it has no exemption for blindness—it’s just a true class record at the Salt Flats. My official record is 62.05 miles per hour, which is the average speed after making two one-mile runs in opposite directions,” Parker explains. “But the trike was just a stepping stone because I knew if I ever wanted to run something fast again, I had to first get my foot in the door.”

Now working alone in a plain, single-car garage behind his tidy, suburban Columbus home, the 46 year old is in the midst of constructing a much bigger and faster machine. With plans to compete early in 2018 in the Loring Timing Association’s (LTA) standing-mile event at Limestone, Maine, Parker is building a classic, open-wheeled “lakester” car, destined to be powered by a Fulton Competition-built, big-block Chevy engine.

“The chassis is sort of like a front-engined dragster, but the motor is moved farther forward so that the weight is more centered, and it’ll have an aluminum body that encloses everything, including the motor, with a canopy that comes down over the cockpit,” he says. “I designed and built the car pretty much by myself. I’ve cut, notched and fitted probably 90 percent of the tubes in the car and I’ve tack welded probably 50 percent of them before a couple of guys I know come over and do the final welding on them. And my intention is to shape and attach 100 percent of the body by myself.

“You know, I grew up in racing; I grew up working with my hands, working with metal, building race cars, and going racing. It’s what I know, so I want to keep on doing it. The bottom line is I’m not going to let blindness win. I’m not going to let it take away my passions in life, so I just had to learn how to do things a little bit different way and just keep going forward.

“And if I go out there and just run a hundred miles an hour I’m willing to accept that, but I firmly believe that to achieve excellence you have to set high targets. So right now the world’s fastest blind man went 204-plus miles per hour, but he did it with a sighted person riding beside him in a modified production car. I want to become the world’s fastest blind man at 225 miles per hour, in a car I built myself, and with no human assistance beside me.”