Sam Schmidt on Finding Purpose After the Finish Line

Sam Schmidt on Finding Purpose After ParalysisScott Robinson

Sam Schmidt embraces his curiously contented – seemingly counter-intuitively contented – life at age 61 with gusto. The former open-wheel racer always is game for a defiantly impossible feat, figuring, “What could go wrong? Break my neck? Been there, done that.”

Yes, he has.

And Sam Schmidt never has done anything halfway.

His 2000 crash at Walt Disney World Speedway at Orlando had maximum impact, literally and figuratively. He hit a bump on the track and lost control of the car, spinning and smashing backward into the unforgiving concrete wall at about 180 miles an hour. The accident immediately left Schmidt—“hell-bent on winning, 35 years old, and convinced I was in my prime”—a quadriplegic.

That’s where his racing career ended but where his mission began. His foundation Conquer Paralysis Now, designed to fund global research to find cures and treatments for paralysis, has spun off two DRIVEN Neuro Recovery Centers, the original at Las Vegas, the other, barely year-old 114,000-square-foot sister facility in the Indianapolis suburb of Carmel, Indiana.

DRIVEN NeuroRecovery Center

“Racing is my passion. DRIVEN is my mission,” Schmidt said.

He detailed his redirected purpose in his as-told-to-Don-Yaeger memoir, No Finish Line: A Racer’s Journey of Passion, Perseverance, and Purpose, which will be available starting May 19. Woven with wit, wisdom, and jarring candor, the book trace Schmidt’s evolution from watching his own father recover from racing-wreck paralysis to watching son Spencer compete on the racetrack—with a balance of reality checks, personal victories, and lofty goals crammed into its 223 pages.

“I don’t wish this on anybody, but it’s become clear after hitting my head a lot of times and resisting it that this was my purpose in life,” he told Autoweek. “That will have a way greater effect longer-term than anything I could have done in racing. So, once I kind of got to that reality,” he, said, he had direction.

Co-owning an IndyCar team (rebranded several times before it became Arrow McLaren) and an Indy Lights operation had occupied a lot of his attention at first and kept him active and relevant in the sport. Then his driver Robert Wickens suffered multiple injuries in a 2018 accident at Pocono, Pennsylvania, and was paralyzed from the waist down.

Schmidt said that when Wickens got hurt, he “kind of saw what was going on in the insurance industry. People were not getting the same opportunities I got because of a lack of reimbursement and all that stuff. So that just really kind of ticked me off. We pay monster premiums our entire life, and then when you need the ability to recover and go back to work, there’s no funding for it. There’s hundreds of thousands of people every year that have a stroke or have a brain injury or have a spinal-cord injury, and every one of them is just being sent home prematurely without a pathway to get back to work and be productive. It’s tragic.

Sam Schmidt and Robert Wickens at the Indy 500 in 2019.Icon Sportswire - Getty Images

“I may not be able to fix that in my lifetime, but we're going to try.” he said.

Clearly, Schmidt has brought his racer’s mentality—resolute single-mindedness—to his initiative, and it’s making a difference.

“I worked, I worked, I worked. I became a race car driver. I was successful. I got hurt. Now it’s time to work, work, work,” he said. “I can look at anybody in the room and say, ‘What's your problem?’ There’s no excuses. Now, the excuse is you may not want to do the work. That’s kind of what it comes down to. I am very blunt—it takes a lot of work, a lot of effort. We can’t do that part for you, but if you’re willing to do the work, we’ll help you get your goals.”

With a bit of cheeky confession, Schmidt said, “DRIVEN has really come about because it is instant gratification for me. I mean, every day, people are making progress and getting their lives back in order, going back to work, getting married, having kids. Just all the things that gave me the strength to do what I’m doing is what we’re trying to replicate there. And so we got Vegas, we got Indy. Geographically, we might have to do some more, simply because the people that need it can't afford to travel to the facilities. So we’re going to have to bring it to them geographically, if that’s possible.

Events such as the upcoming Racing to Recovery Gala at the Indiana Roof Ballroom at the Indiana Theater in downtown Indianapolis raise funds to further Schmidt’s cause. The 26th annual edition will be May 22, saluting the book with its “No Finish Line—A night to celebrate passion, perseverance, and purpose.” Tickets are available through the Conquer Paralysis Now website (https://www.conquerparalysisnow.org/)

Schmidt quickly realized that his own situation was serious but that others battled even tougher odds. He visited a lot of VA hospitals and spent some time with the late Superman actor Christopher Reeve, whose injury level “was so high he couldn’t even hold his head up. He had a brace and he rested his head against the brace. Couldn’t go anywhere without five or six people, 24/7 care. [That] made me look in the mirror and say, ‘You can always be worse.’”

It wasn’t with smugness he said that. It was with appreciation. “Especially the VA, young men and women from Iraq and Afghanistan who signed up to protect their country and be a part of the mission came back with severe brain injuries or [as] amputees, and they’re not really given much of a pep talk. It’s like, yeah, they got good medical care and they’re alive, but a lot of times they just want to go back to work and there’s not [a path]. It’s hard. Life is hard. Yeah. I saw a lot of people that made me thankful to have what I have as far as my brain and my ability to go back to work, because a lot of people don’t even have that,” he said.

Sam Schmidt standing with his wife, Sheila.Sam Schmidt

All this, Schmidt said, is “what gets me up every day.” But he said “it’s also what can be a bit of a pain” for wife Sheila, the 105-pound, sixty-something Wonder Woman he says “throws me around like a sack of potatoes. I guess I’m a built-in weight training.” And so what if he didn’t get to teach Spencer and older sister Savannah how to drive a stick-shift car? They grew up with reality and the aura of optimism from both parents.

“Upon reflection,” Schmidt said, “they’ve turned out to be incredible people, I think largely because they saw their mother’s resilience. It would be lying to say we never had a bad day, but at the same time, we got up, we did the work, and we made things happen, whereas a lot of people didn’t. And they saw a lot of people that didn’t have the resources we did and the ability to get back into life. So that’s why they want to carry on the foundation long after me, which is why we’re still doing it.

“It wasn’t my wife or my kids’ dream to race in Indianapolis or win Indianapolis. That was mine,” he said. “Yet my injury changed their lives forever, and it changed the pathway for all of us. A lot of people look at me and say, ‘It’s amazing what you’ve been able to do.’ But their lives were way more affected than my life. And it’s because I have them and my faith and the community that I’ve been able to do what I’ve been able to do the last 26 years.

“My life’s so blessed. I have said it a thousand times,” Schmidt said, always “recognizing sort of the silver lining in the last 26 years.” In the book, he said, “My life looks nothing like I thought it would, but it is much fuller than I expected after the accident. There’s an amazing amount of people I've met… and there’s a whole list in the book of people that I never would’ve even come in contact with had I not been paralyzed. So I think it’s just looking at things with a different lens.”

Sam Schmidt at the 1999 Indy 500.Sam Schmidt

In Schmidt’s heart, in his mind, he’s still a racer.

“I can look at an in-car camera go around this track and see exactly whether the car’s handling it or not and what’s going on without a computer, without any engineering,” the Pepperdine University graduate said. “I just really need to see what’s happening with the driver’s hands to be able to see whether he’s got an understeer, oversteer, what they’re dealing with, if the setup’s really good. And that’s what I think I liked about Indy Lights so much is the young drivers coming up, trying to shed a little wisdom, trying to help them not make the same mistakes I made. That was probably more fun than IndyCar, because I felt like I had more of an impact.”

And he shared in the book that “When I’m asleep in bed and I’m dreaming, I’m never in my wheelchair. I am always walking. My dream life has never changed, and in some ways, that’s a reminder of the promise of Heaven and the promise that I will walk again. Faith is such a crucial part of my life.

Giving up control of daily living was a massive adjustment for Schmidt. “You are not in control. God is,” he said in the book.” However, he said, the human instinct, the racer’s instinct, is “You definitely want to be in control. Elbows up. That’s the only way I think you could be successful as a driver is to be a little selfish, or a lot selfish. Just nothing-to-stand-in-your-way-type of mentality. But when that’s taken overnight… Before my accident, you could probably count on one hand how many times I actually let somebody else drive the street car that I was in. I always had to be the driver. Then I didn’t have a choice overnight.

“I have to delegate a lot, which made me actually amazingly more productive because I had to delegate and was forced to overnight,” he said. “The nice thing about writing the book was it forced me to reflect on my entire life. And prior to that, I’d never really given it the time. I didn’t slow down enough to reflect and appreciate everything that’s happened in my life. So that was a big unforeseen benefit of writing the book was just that reflection, thinking about things intentionally and what I want to do with the rest of my life. And so that was a pretty cool side effect.”

Sam Schmidt and Alex Tagliani at the 2011 Indy 500.Sam Schmidt

Somebody told Schmidt he’s a “perfect example of the windshield’s a lot bigger than the rearview mirror." He said, “And there’s a reason for that. It’s along the lines of God gave you two ears and one mouth. But you can’t completely throw away the rearview mirror, because I think there’s knowledge in the mistakes. You just think about them, but don’t dwell on them. Just try not to make it happen again.”

For Sam Schmidt, the windshield is wide and clear.