He broke his neck at 17. Now he’s battling for the Chili Bowl trophy

In 2021, Daison Pursley was racing a midget car in Arizona when his entire life changed. Battling another driver for a chance to make it to the next round, he crashed, his car flipping several times in an accident that left the then-17-year-old with a broken neck, his C4 vertebra completely shattered. At the hospital, doctors rushed him into surgery. Pursley woke up to learn that he was now an “incomplete quadriplegic” — a term for partial paralysis in all four limbs.

Pursley, blessedly, doesn’t remember much from that horrifying moment. 

“I got caught up against the fence with another car into (Turn) 3 on a really fast track for midget cars,” he says. “I went end-over-end several times. I don’t remember the wreck, really — I was knocked out.”

Pursley does remember the long road he’s traveled from then until now. 

Pursley in the hospital

“I was paralyzed completely after surgery,” he says. “It’s been years of rehab. “Now, my left side is definitely a little bit weaker than my right. As far as getting inside of a race car, I don’t really notice it at all, but if you ask me to pick up a quarter off the ground with my right or left hand, you would definitely see it.”

You heard that correctly: a few years after breaking his neck and waking up to be told he had paralysis, Pursley is back to racing. “There’s been a lot of doctors, and everyone, just tell me I’m a miracle,” he says. 

This week, he’s behind the wheel of a midget racer again, taking on the Chili Bowl in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But the road — or, maybe, the dirt track — that Pursley took to get here has been filled with anything but easy laps.

“Some people are lucky”

It took about a week for the feeling to come back in his right leg, remembers Pursley. Slowly, he regained sensation throughout his entire body. But the one thing that was strong from the moment he could talk: his will to get back into a race car. 

“As soon as that ventilator came out, he was telling us, ‘When I race again, when I race again,'” remembers his mother, Shawnda. “Did we believe he was going to race again? No, not at that hour. We were just hoping he was having a little bit of hope.”

Shawnda stayed by her son’s side through the hard days in the hospital and beyond. “Daison’s determination was so huge that I knew we had to get him into the best places to continue his healing process. It was a journey that I wish upon nobody —  but it is not a journey I would tell you I wish we didn’t take. Everything that has happened, has happened for a reason.”

Pursley during his recovery

Pursley, of course, had to build himself back up. But he also discovered he had more people in his corner than he anticipated. He heard words of encouragement from friends and family, of course — and new friends, too. Justin Grant (2022 USAC sprint car champion) and NASCAR driver J.J. Yeley reached out. So did strangers. 

“I say it every time: Thank you isn’t enough for the people that — whether it was on Facebook, the racing community — reached out and helped,” says Pursley. “Most people have no idea how much it meant to me when they would just reach out and send, like, ‘Get well soon’ or whatever kind of message. It meant a lot to me.” 

“And that’s what drove me to get out of bed and climb back into one of those animals out there,” he says, pointing at the track in Tulsa.

One person in particular helped Pursley understand what lay ahead for him as he laid in that hospital bed.

“A good source that we had was Dr. [Terry] Trammell with IndyCar,” says Pursley. “He reached out to us and told us to get in touch with Robert Wickens during the early stages, because we didn’t know what it was going to look like.” 

Robert Wickens suffered a crash in IndyCar at Pocono in 2018 left him paralyzed from the waist down. Wickens wasn’t able to get back behind the wheel of a race car one day, albeit with hand controls. Pursley knows that even with all the hard work he put in, his own comeback wasn’t a given. 

“Some people are lucky,” says Pursley.

Back on track

Whether it was luck, determination, a higher power, or some combination of the three that helped put Pursley’s harrowing accident in the rear view, he’s now the one back in the driver’s seat. He had to recalibrate himself at first: “Running too hard,” as he puts it, when he got back on track after being given the all-clear to race again. Then, having to “tame it down a little” — only to realize he needed some of that edge.  

“Almost like a year or so I felt it took me to get back to where I was comfortable in the car and making the decisions that I really wanted to.”

Pursley believes the crash made him a better racer. “People say, from the outside, that I am a way smarter racer now,” he says. “At first, I think it was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to prove these people wrong. I’m not scared. I can do this.’”

He proved that sooner than anyone could have anticipated. 

Pursley during the 2024 USAC season

“I remember waking up in the hospital — and I don’t exactly remember how [many] days it was, but my parents told me about my broken neck and [I] couldn’t move,” he says. “And I was like, ‘Whoa, does this mean I can’t run the Chili Bowl?’” 

His accident happened in November, and no, he would not be ready to race again only two months later. But 14 months? Yes.

Pursley was back in Tulsa for the 2023 running of the Chili Bowl Nationals. He was back again in 2024, making his way through the soup from the D-Main to finish fourth in the main event.  

“Growing up here [near Tulsa], it’s just one of the biggest races that I’ve ever laid my eyes on,” says Pursley. “I’ve been coming up here since I was four or five years old. This place is just special. This place is just a place that I want to win. I want to have one of those little Golden Drillers that everyone talks about. I’ve been close. I’ve done everything but win.”

He’s got a real shot this weekend: Because the Toyota-powered driver wheeled his Keith Kunz Motorsports midget to a second-place finish in the Wednesday night prelim, he’s locked into the main event. All he has left to do is take home the trophy. 

It’d be a hell of a comeback story for Pursley, if he didn’t already have one.