Looking back on his life, former NHRA Top Fuel racer Darrell Gwynn is amused about one peculiar phenomenon.

He laughed and said he’s amazed that his parents allowed him to pursue his dream: “Like, OK, what were you thinking? I’m 19 years old. You’re letting me travel around the country in an 18-wheeler with no adult supervision. What were you thinking?’”

Clearly, though, he’s glad Jerry and Joan Gwynn did, even though his passion brought as much heartache as it did happiness. Confined to a wheelchair and paralyzed from the chest down for 33 years following an exhibition-pass accident in 1990, Darrell candidly said, “I didn’t sign up for this club.”

But he also said, “I wouldn’t trade anything for the wisdom I have from being on the road, the wisdom and the circumstances I’ve been in in my life, whether it be on the road or behind the scenes or on the track or wherever. I mean it. I’ve been in a lot of different good, bad, crazy scenarios in life, scenarios that are going to happen no matter what. I learned from the best of people and had the best of times. And I’d never trade it for anything.”

Does that include the hard-to-understand stuff?

Without hesitation, Gwynn said, “Yep.”

Jerry Gwynn, known for his Alcohol Funny Car driving skills and his mechanical expertise, was the 1969 NHRA Super Eliminator champion when Darrell was an elementary-school student, about seven years old – around the time Jerry built him a scaled-down dragster. The elder Gwynn is a six-time Southeast Division “Wrench of the Year” recipient, as well as a winner at the divisional and national levels, and Darrell inherited his aptitude. The son captured the 1983 Top Alcohol Dragster crown, became the face of NHRA’s future with a promising Top Fuel career, racked up 18 victories, and plunged elbows-deep into prepping the dragster.

“I’m still interested in the mechanical side of it more than anything. Do I miss the driving? Yeah,” Gwynn said, “but I think figuring out how to make ’em go is one of the things that intrigues me, as well. I’m not a mechanical mastermind, but I do enjoy being involved in the mechanical side of the car, working on the car, and I was always the driver that worked on the car and serviced it between races and did all the maintenance and made a lot of the decisions and stuff.

“In my later years, I had a crew chief, Ken Veney. Ken was such a great opportunity and a great friend and smart guy, and we worked well together. It made perfect sense, and we had a lot of success together. But before that, it was just me and my dad. When I was young, I was all boy. I was all about racing. I mean, yeah, I was a kid that liked to ride my bike and ride my skateboard, use my fishing and pole all the time. But other than that, it was all about racing with my dad.

As a teenager, Gwynn leaned hard on his working-class parents to pursue drag racing full-time. He said, “I remember sitting at my parents’ dinner table when I was 18, trying to figure out how we were going to afford to do this. And my dad said, ‘We can’t afford it.’ There weren’t too many people that had sponsors that were able to afford to do this. It was basically one two against one. It was my mom and dad saying, ‘How are we going to do it?’ and me saying, ‘Oh, we can do it. We can do it.’ And I had no idea. I had youth and enthusiasm, and that’s all I knew at the time. We somehow managed to do it without a sponsor up until – through – my alcohol days and the first couple years of Top Fuel.”

I’m still interested in the mechanical side of it more than anything. Do I miss the driving? Yeah, but I think figuring out how to make ’em go is one of the things that intrigues me, as well.

And what a sight he was, this youngster in a pack of Teamsters coursing the country’s highways.

“I didn’t have a lot of experience at 19 years old. I didn’t have a lot of experience driving a tractor trailer when I was driving a tractor trailer,” Gwynn said, conceding that he didn’t have much experience at that point behind the wheel of passenger car, either. “No, no, I didn’t. The first car I got my license in was a AA/Altered, which is kind of a ride in itself. They say if you can drive one of those, you can drive anything. So I learned in one of those. But all the truckers in the world were all older people. There were no young truckers. The youngest people driving a truck were some of the other racers, the Dale Puldes of the world or whatever.

“We were all just carneys in the beginning, every one of us. I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting lately about all the memories of going down the road with my dad and me being on the road by myself with an 18-wheeler.”

Back then his life was “just 24/7 racing on the brain,” Gwynn said. “Your priorities change, but 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. I remember being around some of the other racers, older racers, I won’t say any names, but their priorities were like, ‘Where are we going to going to eat tonight?’ and ‘How early a flight can we get out after the race? Make two or three flight arrangements in case we go out first round.’ That was not even in the picture.” He said for him “it was like, ‘No, no – I’m staying here and I’m going to work on this thing afterwards, and then we’re going to drive all night to go to the next one, whatever it was. That’s all I do. And I really miss those times, that’s for sure. But those times are long gone.”

Fond are his memories of “the good, the bad, the ugly, the figuring out how to get in trouble and figuring out how to get out of trouble. We learned about thinking before you get in trouble. We weren’t bad boys. We were just a bunch of young kids, just having time of our lives and we didn’t even know it, to be honest,” Gwynn said. “I miss the days of four guys to a room and just having a ball and having a very competitive car and going around the country and with a half-volunteer crew, just going around the country and doing our thing and winning races and setting records and having a good time. And having a good time was a big part of our culture. We worked really, really hard, and we played really, really hard. That made the dynamics of the team so much greater.”

Ironic, too, was the fact that Gwynn didn’t drink alcohol but was a great ambassador for beer companies Budweiser and Coors. “That had its benefits for the crew,” he said. “At the time they weren’t getting paid a lot of money, but when the beer showed up, man, they were all smiles.

“I raced from [ages] 19 to 28 and [in] that time, I never drank,” Gwynn said. “I took a sip of beer, of course, in the winners circle at Indy [in 1989], when everybody just was hounding me to do it after not eating all day. And I almost fell over, because I hadn’t eaten all day and hadn’t been drinking in 10 years. I was dedicated, and I didn’t want drinking to get in the way of anything. I just didn’t want drinking to be getting in the way of the racing, because that’s all I thought about 24 hours a day. I’m not sure where I got that willpower from, other than drag racing, because drag racing kept me out of trouble.”

Ah, but drag racing produces its own kind of trouble. In Gwynn’s case, it was irreversible trouble. Like an indifferent thief, it robbed Gwynn of his mobility, a portion of his left arm, and a definite answer of just how sensational his career could have been. Sometimes drag racing is no respecter of hard and sincere work – as a teenager, he cut grass and sold airplane-engine fans he picked out from an aviation salvage yard, all to contribute to his drag-racing.

But nothing has robbed Gwynn of his joy. His friends say he has exactly the same personality he had before his April 15, 1990, accident at the UK’s Santa Pod Raceway, and he’s perpetually positive and cheerful.

His legacy in part is his meteoric rise on the racetrack, but it has come to include the work he has done through his foundation – known today as the Darrell Gwynn Quality of Life Chapter of The Buoniconti Fund To Cure Paralysis. He and his program provide wheelchairs to those in need, supply additional support to paralyzed individuals, educate about spinal-cord injuries, and help contribute to the research segment of The Buoniconti Fund/The Miami Project.

And no matter how many fundraising fishing tournaments Gwynn hosts for NASCAR’s Daytona 500 VIPs or how many versions of “Track Walk…For Those Who Can’t” he leads on the NHRA side of motorsports, the goal for him personally will be elusive.

He said the damage his accident did has left him in no position to benefit from some of the possible break-throughs in spinal-cord injury treatment. Biofeedback programs, exoskeletons, and other currently available nerve-stimulation methods are not options.  “So, I am what I am, let’s put it that way,” Gwynn said.

“The way I explain it is a spinal cord is the texture of a strawberry. And obviously, I hit the wall pretty hard [in 1990]. So it was a high-velocity accident. There’s people with my same injury, but their spinal cord didn’t hurt as bad, that have walked out of the hospital. We actually saw a guy walk in the hospital in England holding his neck while he was walking in saying, ‘I think I broke my neck.’ But the spinal cord, my spinal cord, is injured so bad that they’re kind of like the telephone wires,” he said. “They’re cut and they’re not just damaged. Some of ’em are severed. And it’s hard to get the signal to go back through those wires when it’s damaged so bad in that area, so to speak.”

We weren’t bad boys. We were just a bunch of young kids, just having time of our lives and we didn’t even know it, to be honest.

But the beauty of Darrell Gwynn shone through when he said, “I’m fortunate in a lot of ways, there’s a lot of people that are like me, that have the same kind of injury as me, that may not have the same resources or the amount of friends or support that I’ve got. I know I’m very fortunate in that regard. And I don’t have a chance to get down, because these people around me would kind of knock me back up.”

His original crew represents only a fraction of the friends and racing associates who would – and do –  support Gwynn emotionally. And when Gwynn prepped for his Hall of Fame induction earlier this year, a flood of fun memories swept back into his consciousness. The gang was back together. They were kids again. The merriment continued, if only in their memories.

“We were just all bunch of kids having a great time. We had a blast,” he said. One of his crew members called Gwynn about three times in the past few months, reminiscing along the same lines, telling him they couldn’t wait to join him at Daytona Beach this March, when Gwynn was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America.

“A lot of times they’ll call me 10 o’clock at night,” Gwynn said. “And they’ll say, ‘Man, I’ve just got to tell you, we had the time of our life back then. We didn’t even know it, man. We had so much freaking fun. It was great memories for all of us.’”

Gwynn asked each former crew member to join him at Daytona for the Hall of Fame induction ceremony. And they were there, every one of them: Chris Cunningham, Mike Cunningham, Andre Hayes, Tony Mills, Joe Shaffer, and Dave Tomasch.

“This makes me feel the best,” Gwynn said.