DirtonDirt exclusive
Pierce's determination after ‘life-altering’ stroke
By Kyle McFadden
DirtonDirt staff reporter
Bob Pierce is rebounding from a recent stroke. (photosbyboyd.smugmug.com)
When Bob Pierce was life-flighted to the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha following the serious stroke July 15, Angie Pierce knew life would change forever for her family and Bobby Pierce Racing.
"I told (Bobby) right then and there, 'Our lives are ... drastically going to change,' " Angie said. "Seeing the condition Bob was in, I thought, this is going to be life-altering."
Two days later, Angie received miraculous proof that her 74-year-old husband was still, unmistakably, Bob Pierce, the team's crew chief and former Hall of Fame driver. The revelation didn't come from a neurologist's report.
It came Friday night during the Silver Dollar Nationals at Shelby County Speedway, where Bobby returned to the track some 50 miles away in Harlan, Iowa, while Bob remained in the intensive care unit waiting for doctors to perform a second procedure the following Monday.
Bob, of course, refused to miss a single lap watching from his hospital bed, even with ICU staff interrupting him every 15 minutes to check his vitals, movement and neurological responses. Angie, meanwhile, tracked down an Amazon Fire Stick so they could stream FloRacing's Silver Dollar Nationals live coverage on the room's TV.
"The crazy thing about it is, I'm sitting in the hospital next to him, and Bobby's blowing his phone up," Angie said. "They're talking, like, literally every minute. ... Bob was like, 'Do this. Do this. Put this on that.' This was all two days into having a stroke — two days! — and you could see how tired he was. He had zero energy."
Then came the moment that erased the brunt of Angie's doubts, when Bobby needed more than simple setup advice. He needed a specific shock, but couldn't remember which one — or where it sat inside the trailer. Using FaceTime on his phones came, he showed several options.
“ 'No, not that shock,’ " Angie remembered Bob saying. “ 'Look for the one that's on the counter, on the left, on the bottom.' Like, he knew. He was able to tell him."
When Bobby found it and began to make adjustments, Bob wasn't finished.
"He'd say, 'No, no, no. Turn it this way. Do this this way,’ " she said.
Watching from beside his hospital bed, Angie realized the stroke hadn't touched Bob's mastermind, one cultivated through decades of building race cars, perfecting setups and raising a generational superstar in his son, Bobby. It was clear the essence of Bob remained.
"I'm just sitting there thinking, 'He didn't lose this,' " Angie said. "I'm like, 'Dang, you remember every single thing about the race car and the setups.' Then he's like, 'Last race we did this. This race we did that.' This guy is in ICU two days into having a stroke, and he's telling Bobby exactly what to do."
Just two weeks later, Bob returned for his first full race weekend alongside his son at Cedar Lake Speedway, helping guide Bobby to victory in Saturday's USA Nationals — their first triumph together since the stroke that threatened far more than a racing season.
"I could've gotten real emotional tonight if I wanted to," the elder Pierce said after Bobby's third USA Nationals victory in four years. "I was close to doing so. I wanted it for him, too. He needed another win."
Throughout his recovery, Bob has quietly battled the fear that he can no longer give Bobby everything he's always provided. Whether it's the energy, the sharpness to stay ahead of every adjustment or simply the confidence to make the right call, Bob has spent the last two weeks trying to prove he's still the same crew chief — and father.
"The biggest thing that bugs me about it is I can't go as hard as I want to go, stay on top of everything," the elder Pierce said. "I feel like I'm the problem of why we're not running good. I blame it on myself all the time. Just trying to stay focused and keep him focused."
That self-doubt has made Bob more mindful than ever, forcing him to constantly check himself throughout the day.
"I think twice as hard to make sure I don't do something wrong or forget to do something," he said. "If I do something, I make sure I do it right. I'm watching over myself a lot. I feel like I'm OK. I just feel like everything is in slow motion. That's the weird part."
Angie, meanwhile, has heard those concerns from Bob almost nightly over the last two weeks.
"Bob, we've talked at night over these last couple races where we've been just a little bit off," Angie said. "It's not his fault, but he takes the blame for that stuff. So he'll be like, 'Yeah, I'm just not as sharp. I'm just not as sharp yet.' And there might be a little bit of truth in that. He might be missing a little bit, but he's not missing much. He's still Bob."
A long but rewarding three days at Cedar Lake Speedway put Bob to the test: a full Thursday program, a 3-9 p.m. shift preparing the team's backup car during Friday's rainout following a lackluster 12th-place run Thursday in the primary race machine, and Saturday's 8.5-hour marathon that began with 5 p.m. hot laps and ended with USA Nationals celebrations shortly after 1:15 a.m.
The stroke's lingering effects were most noticeable in Bob's pace. He still used his electric bike around the pits, but only sparingly, never venturing too far from the team's trailer in case he needed a break. He walked more deliberately than before the stroke, his speech occasionally more mumbled, and left anything heavier than 10 pounds for others to carry under doctors' orders.
Even so, the workload he endured represented a remarkable change from where he'd been less than two weeks earlier. He even gave DirtonDirt a six-minute interview after the incredibly long night Saturday that stretched into Sunday morning.
When he was discharged from the hospital July 21, an adverse reaction to blood thinners forced doctors to keep him near the University of Nebraska Medical Center for another 24 hours before allowing him to travel. During the emergency procedure to remove the clot, doctors accessed an artery through Bob's groin, leaving the puncture site especially vulnerable while he remained on blood thinners.
The instructions were clear: no lifting more than 10 pounds, no excessive bending, no overexertion — not even climbing more than a few steps beyond getting in and out of the camper or car.
"They said, 'We're going to let you out, but you have to stay within 5 miles of the hospital for 24 hours,'" Angie said. "With his blood being so thin, they were worried that if that artery opened back up, he could bleed to death. That's why he couldn't travel right away."
The following morning, once doctors cleared him to travel, Angie drove their motorhome eight hours to FloRacing Night in America at Fairbury (Ill.) Speedway. Bob was exhausted from the trip, even as a passenger, but determined to return to crew-chiefing duties.
"So we get there, and I'm like, ‘All right, babe, I'm gonna get the T-shirt trailer going. I'll let you go to the pits. But you know the rules,' " Angie recalled. " 'No bending. No this. No that. No climbing stairs. No nothing.' "
For a little bit, she thought he'd listened. Then her phone started buzzing with photos of Bob in the grandstands, stick-signaling to Bobby during his heat race.
"Now the man's exhausted. He's on strict orders," Angie said. "It wasn't even so much the stroke. He had to be very careful because of the opening in his artery. So I'm getting all these pictures of him stick-signaling, and then (Bobby's wife) Abby comes over and says, 'Bob looks exhausted.' I'm like, 'Hell no!' So I beeline over.
"He was exhausted. He was done," she added. "I told him, 'You're done for the night.' "
The couple watched the feature from the trailer, where Bobby spent much of the race mired in the middle of the pack. Frustrated, Bob couldn't study his son's race car because the FloRacing broadcast rarely showed it.
"He's like, 'I can't even see Bobby's car to see what it's doing,' " Angie said. "I said, 'That's what you get for misbehaving. You were up there doing way too much, too fast.' "
Bob knows exactly what doctors have asked of him. That doesn't make it any easier to sit still.
"They didn't even want me coming to the racetrack for weeks, not even wanting me to walk down that trailer step. 'Don't pick shocks and springs up. Don't do this. Don't do that,'" the elder Pierce said. "Golly, I got to do something here. I can't just sit."
After more recovery time, Angie is more comfortable letting Bob be Bob.
"Right now, he just physically gets tired. He needs to rest a couple times during the day, go in the truck and at least sit down," she said. "He obviously can't lift much — his weight limit is 10 pounds — and he needs to not do so much bending. But I think he's good. He has a little short-term memory. Just little things. But he's almost completely back. He's doing good."
A mantra from neurologists that stuck with the Pierces throughout Bob's hospitalization was "time is brain," underscoring how every minute after a stroke can shape a patient's recovery and long-term quality of life.
Looking back, Angie believes where Bob suffered the stroke may have made all the difference.
"If you could be in the best place to have a stroke, I feel like we were definitely in the best place," Angie said. "We ended up finding out that Omaha has one of the best stroke hospital facilities in the country. We've been teasing him, like, 'I guess if you're going to have a stroke, you did it at the right place.' I don't think we would've been as lucky had we been somewhere else to get the attention we got as quickly as we did."
The gravity of those first few hours never left her.
"Knowing the condition I found him in, I was worried that this was the condition that we may have him for the rest of his life," Angie said. "Fortunately, I learned a lot about strokes, and I learned that you can overcome a lot of that with the timely response they were able to give him. We were just completely blessed, and we're blessed to have him back."
While Matt Langston, Kevin Rumley and the Longhorn Dynamics team have helped shoulder the team's workload over the last two weeks — something the Pierces are deeply thankful for — Bob's presence and wealth of knowledge simply can't be replaced.
"Bob knows Bobby, and he knows his driving style. What works for Bobby may not work for anybody else in the pits," Angie said. "That's what Bob has to tell a lot of people a lot of the time. When they're like, 'Well do this, well do that.' And he's like, 'Well, but Bobby doesn't drive that way.' Bobby might charge the corner a little bit harder, or do this or do that.
"So they have to adjust to fit Bobby's needs. And that's where Bob comes into play because Bob knows Bobby. That's what makes the two of them magical together."
To Angie, Bob's experience gives him a perspective few, if any, people in the sport can match.
"What other person in our sport has been one of the greatest drivers of all time — I'm not saying he's Scott Bloomquist or Billy Moyer … I'm just going to say his record has been great," she said. "He's been one of the best chassis builders of all time. We built the UMP Chassis of the Year for, like, 14 or 15 years in a row. And now, he races with his son and is probably one of the best setup guys in the world.
"So, I mean, who else has accomplished all of that in our sport? There's nobody. There is nobody who's done all that to the level he has. … (Rocket Chassis co-founder) Mark Richards builds a winning chassis and he won with his son, but he never drove a car and won the races Bob did. Bob, he's just special."
Bob's recovery remains a work in progress. Next on the agenda is finding a neurologist for regular follow-up care, preferably in Indianapolis, about 90 minutes from the team’s home base in Oakwood, Ill.
"Right now, we're looking for a doctor in Indianapolis. I need followup because we're not going seven hours back to where I was at," Bob said. "Still working on that. Don't think we've found one yet. I'm sure we'll have to squeeze that in somewhere along the line. They want to do a sonogram on all my arteries, make sure everything is still flowing good."
The 74-year-old now begins each day with five pills and takes another each night. He’s rarely dealt with health issues before his stroke.
"I think that's what's dragging me down," Bob said. "I don't know what they're doing — that's the most pills I've ever taken in my life. I've never had anything wrong."
Even now, Bob refuses to let the aftereffects from the stroke define him.
"I'm just gonna keep diggin'," the elder Pierce said. "It ain't no big deal. … We're not going to give up, that's for damn sure. I can do it slow, but we're not going to stop."
