Driving a race car is no easy thing. Amidst the tumult and traffic there are pedals to push, a steering wheel to turn and a gear shifter to move, and it generally demands a driver’s full attention, not to mention all four limbs.
Now imagine being a race driver with only one arm.
To say the least, it is hard to imagine a one-armed person being a competitive racer, let alone winning. Yet 51-year-old Quenton Borreson has been winning Figure 8 races at Evergreen Speedway for much of the last three decades. He finished first in the super stock Figure 8 standings last season when he won eight of 10 races, and he is again the points leader midway through this year’s schedule.
“I always say he’s a guy that has half as many arms as the rest of us and he’s still twice as good,” said rival driver Doug Delfel of Everett.
Borreson lost his right arm just below the shoulder after an industrial accident when he was 19. He took up racing the next year and the sport became both a passion and a blessing. Not only was it fun, it also allowed him to prove to others and maybe even to himself that he could be much more than an invalid.
“I won’t say that racing has consumed my life, but it’s been my life,” he said. “It’s been something that I always look forward to and it’s something that I just love. No matter what, and even if I have a bad night, I love every aspect of it.”
For most drivers, two hands are necessary not only to drive, but also to fasten a chin strap or latch a seat belt, and even to climb in and out of the car. Of course, shifting gears is the most problematic for someone without a right arm, given that the shifter is on a racer’s right side.
“I personally can’t imagine how he does it,” said Mike Gallagher of Everett, the owner of a rival car and a longtime racing friend. “You watch him do a qualifying lap, where you have to start from a dead stop and then you have to go through at least three gears, and if you watch the car you’d never know that he’s having to let go of the wheel, probably (holding it in place) with his knee, reaching across his body to grab a gear, and then there’s a little clutch action going on there, too. It just fascinates me how he does all that.”
Though everyone obviously knows of Borreson’s disability, track regulars “don’t talk about it much,” Gallagher said. “And maybe it’s because he’s been doing it for so long. Maybe we all just kind of accept it. But I’m still totally at awe.”
In 1983, and one year after his graduation from Marysville Pilchuck High School, Borreson lost his arm while working at a boat manufacturer in Arlington. He was spraying a heated acidic chemical known as perchloroethylene to remove wax from windshield frames, and although he was wearing a respirator he was overcome by fumes. He collapsed unconscious as the chemical continued flowing from the sprayer, and it eventually seeped beneath his protective clothing.
Borreson ended up with burn scars on his face, legs, left arm and chest which are visible to this day. But the most severe damage was to his right arm, where the caustic chemical ate away at the skin, muscles, tendons and nerves to cause hideous and irreparable damage.
Borreson spent nine months at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center, first in intensive care and later in the center’s burn unit. He nearly died from his injuries — “It was pretty touch and go for the first three days, and it was a battle for quite a while,” he said — and after three weeks he was told he might still die if doctors did not amputate his right arm.
After the surgery, “I remember knowing that I didn’t have my arm anymore,” he said. “But I wasn’t able to look. I wasn’t able to accept that yet.”
Even after leaving the hospital, “life was pretty rough. My mom and dad were taking care of me, and pretty soon I was able to start driving again. But everywhere I went, like to the grocery store, kids would stare (at his scars and missing arm).
“It was really a transition for me. I fell into drugs and stuff like that just to try to get past it. I clearly made some big mistakes in my life. But I finally got myself clean and sober, and I started racing.”
At the track, Borreson found a community of racing teams that has been both congenial and accepting. For the most part, his missing arm is a non-issue, save for the occasional teasing he accepts good-naturedly. Indeed, his track nickname is “the One-Armed Bandit,” a moniker Borreson embraces.
And when it comes to racing, having one less arm than everyone else “doesn’t hold me back whatsoever,” said Borreson, who has a home in Aberdeen, but stays during the week with a friend in Snohomish County where he works a construction job.
“It’s really amazing how Quenton has adapted to driving the car with one arm,” Delfel said. “He’s definitely been an inspiration to (others in) the sport, and I’ve got to believe he’s also an inspiration to the people who are watching in the grandstand.”
“He’s been at the top for a while and he’ll probably still be at the top for a long while,” Gallagher said. “He’s on a level with the pros that do this for a living. It always blows my mind with what he sees and notices. He knows how to take advantage of every situation on the track, and it’s why he’s kicking our asses.”
But despite Borreson’s many successes in the competitive and often emotional sport of auto racing, “I don’t know of anybody who doesn’t like driving against him or has a bad word to say about him,” Gallagher said.
Having grown up attending races in Monroe — his step-dad, former Figure 8 driver Carl Zaretzke, is one of the big names in Evergreen Speedway history — Borreson says the track is almost like a second home. Even when he took several years off from the mid-1990s to 2011, he was regularly at the speedway, either helping out or watching from the stands.
He is unsure how many more years he will race. For now he is driving a car owned by Dave Brandenburg who lives near Monroe and with crew chief Tommy Gapp of Bonney Lake, and there is no reason to think that Borreson will be leaving anytime soon.
But he insists he will have no trouble stepping away when the time is right.
“At some point you might lose your edge,” he pointed out. “You might lose your reflexes and then you might start wrecking. As long as that doesn’t happen, I think I’ll be OK. But by the same point, (you eventually) realize that it’s time.
“But even though I won’t be driving, I’ll still be a big part of it as a car owner or as just a spectator, whatever it turns out to be,” he said. Being at the speedway “has been my whole life and it’ll continue to be my whole life until the day I die.”
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