SNOHOMISH, Wash. — One of drag racing’s most storied careers took flight in an aircraft junkyard in Davie, Fla., and recently landed in the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America.
Teenager Darrell Gwynn, admittedly with “24/7 racing on the brain,” built up a nest egg for a race car by cutting grass and buying aircraft blowers, painting them and selling them for $20 apiece to the sport’s top drivers. By age 19, he was driving a semi-trailer truck around the country, he and his band of volunteers … “winning races and setting records … just a bunch of young kids … having the time of our lives. And we didn’t even know it, to be honest,” Gwynn said. “When I was young and racing, we didn’t care where we ate, what we did, as long as the car was running good, the car was together.”
He and the crew would stay behind, service the car and drive all night to the next one, wherever it was.
Gwynn stepped up to the NHRA Top Fuel ranks and won 18 races. Along the way, he was touched by the heartbreaking-then-uplifting drama of the Buoniconti family. Young Marc Buoniconti, whose famous dad Nick was a star linebacker for the Miami Dolphins, suffered a paralyzing spinal-cord injury during a college football game.
And Nick Buoniconti established the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis. Gwynn displayed the Miami Project’s wheelchair logo on his dragster, and soon his sponsor, Coors, became involved.
“We had a big press conference in Miami, had a lot of the big-wigs down from Coors and made a big announcement that we were going to start donating money to the Miami Project,” Gwynn said. “And man, we were winning races and writing checks. And April 15, 1990, changed all that.”
That Easter Sunday was the day Gwynn’s promising driving career — and Gwynn himself — was crushed in a violent on-track wreck during an exhibition run in England in what Gwynn called “just kind of a wild twist of fate.”
He was left paralyzed from the chest down and doctors were unable to save his lower left arm.
By 2002, Gwynn had joined forces with the Buoniconti Fund, this time not as an empathetic athlete but as a trooper in the trenches, educating the public about spinal-cord injury prevention and raising funds to develop a cure for paralysis. His work with his own foundation and its Wheelchair Donation Program has helped dozens of people with spinal-cord injuries become more mobile.
Gwynn merged his foundation into the Miami Project as the Darrell Gwynn Quality of Life Chapter of the Buoniconti Fund in 2014. His annual fan-engaging “Walk for Those Who Can’t” during the NHRA Gatornationals in Gainesville, Fla., and the “Hot Rods and Reels” fishing tournament during NASCAR’s Daytona Speedweek support much-needed research and his donation of customized and motorized wheelchairs to children.
“I didn’t sign up for this club. I’m a racer at heart. I’m still a racer,” Gwynn said.
And that’s the essence of why his peers selected him for induction into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America.
“I look at this as the greatest professional accomplishment of my life,” Gwynn said. “We won a championship and won a lot of races, but to get recognized by the largest motorsports-related Hall of Fame is remarkable for me. It was about what we were able to accomplish in a short period of time. What means the most to me is the former inductees vote on who gets into the Hall of Fame, so the racers voted me in. When your peers vote you in, that means the most to me. I’m very honored and humbled. I never thought my name would be included with those people’s. Not bad for a kid from North Miami.
“I was just a little kid, peeking my head through a hole in the fence, watching these guys race and hoping I could compete with them some day. And that was kind of the extent of it. And not only did I get to race with them, the same group of racers felt I was worthy of being voted into the Hall of Fame. It doesn’t get any better.”
This story appeared in the April 12, 2023 edition of the SPEED SPORT Insider.
