ROUSH RETURNS TO TRACK

5/31/2002

Dover, Del. — Jack Roush, owner of the Roush Racing Tauruses driven by Mark Martin, Jeff Burton, Matt Kenseth and Kurt Busch, made his first appearance at a race track today since being injured in an airplane accident last month.

JACK ROUSH, CAR OWNER — 6, 17, 97, 99 TAURUSES "Guys and girls, I’ve really missed you. I can’t say how excited I am to be back in the fray — to be able to smell the gas, to be able to hear the keyboards being hit here in the press room. I had a really bad situation that was maybe exaggerated a little bit and I’m gonna talk about that in a minute, but I had something that gave me pause — that certainly put me down for a period of time so I had time to reflect on my life and the things that I’d done and the things that I’d still like to do and to feel some joy and some appreciation for the fact that I’ve got a chance to keep going. But for all the things that happen at the race tracks and for all the things that happen in this great industry that we’re all a part of, I’ve really missed it and I can’t tell you how glad I am to be back.

"It was a really odd situation. The actual accident occurred on my birthday. I was in the company of friends and we were enjoying airplanes that I had an interest in. I was flying a little airplane that had been used by National Geographic to map the rainforest in South America. It was an experimentally-built airplane. It was not an ultra-light, but it was closer to the size of an ultra-light than the planes I normally fly. Within two miles of the Troy, Alabama airport, which is where we were having our little party with Kenny Campbell and Wiley Sanders -- they’re folks that had been involved in airplane racing at Reno, not lately but previously, so they’re my heroes for some of the things that they had done. So I was down there and they were being hospitable to me, letting me fly their little airplane. Within two miles of the airport there was a little bass fishing lake and, unless you went as far north as the Talladega race track, which was another 50 miles away, there wasn’t much going on but this little bass lake.

"I flew over one end of the bass lake, which had some high-tension power lines that were marked. You could see the poles. They were cut into the trees and I bounced over those and dropped down to about 80 feet like I was flying a helicopter or I was mapping the rainforest in South America. And, would you believe, they put a second set of parallel high-tension power lines in there and you couldn’t see the cables and you couldn’t see the towers and you couldn’t see a cut through the trees, and I ran into one of them. The good news was that after I stopped this airplane from flying at 80 feet or 100 feet off the ground, that it crashed into what was beneath it and there was some water down there. That broke my fall and caused me not to probably get more serious internal injuries and no telling what else. That broke my fall and I wound up in the water.

"Now I’m in the water. I probably got my concussion, got my head banged as I hit the water or as I hit the bottom of the lake underneath the water. I’m upside-down. I’ve still got some air left in my lungs and, low and behold, there’s Larry Hicks - a retired sergeant major in the marine corps. His wife is also a sergeant major. When they came to see me the first time I sympathized with her for all the issues she probably had being married to a career military guy that had been in Vietnam and all these other things. It turns out, she’s the same rank as he is. She had the same problem with him that he had with her - they were both career people. I really stepped on my shoe there.

"He had the training in Vietnam that let him know how to get somebody out of a helicopter or out of an airplane that was in shallow water, so he knew about the rescue techniques, he knew about the seat belts. He’d either been fishing with his grandson or was going to go fishing with his grandson and he had a little boat there that had an electric motor on it that was all hooked up with a battery. When I hit the water 100 yards off shore, he ran down on his bad knees to the shoreline, got in his little boat which was all ready and paddled his way out to me.

"There was considerable risk that he faced. I expected him to be here today. We thought he was gonna arrive at Baltimore around 9:30 this morning, so he must be held up in traffic or the flight was delayed. This is the first time that he hasn’t been there when I needed him. He jumped in the water. There were two little engines that were marginally out of the water. Fuel was leaking onto the water. There was a lot of vapors and a lot of fuel and hot engines that were popping and cracking in the water. So when he jumped in the water, it wasn’t so clear that there wasn’t gonna be a bad fire. So he jumped in the water and went down and found me. He determined where I was and then went back down and released the seat belts and I popped up. Then he had the experience to know how to do the Heimlich maneuver and how to get me started breathing again. That really gave me the chance to be here today.

"If I hadn’t hit the water and had the chance to drown, I almost certainly would have been killed if he hadn’t been there. I cannot imagine all the miles of shoreline around all the small lakes in Alabama, not to mention the rest of the country. He was probably the only guy that was there with a boat that would have been ready. I crashed at exactly the right spot and the right time. We can wonder why that happened that way.

"I really almost shudder a little bit with the responsibility that I feel for the chance that I’m being given and for the fact that I may not do something with the rest of my life that would justify that bit of happenstance or the miracle that occurred.

"But he got me out of the water and got me breathing. The EMS people came and waited out there. They had a gurney and got me in the gurney. Larry had me up against the wing of the airplane and was helping me breathe or making sure I stayed with my head above water. I was interacting with him. From what he said, we weren’t talking about what happened that day, but w