Losing your life’s dream is hard, but as educator and Morehouse College president Benjamin Elijah once wrote, “The tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. It isn’t a calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream.”
Such is the case with a young Albuquerque man named Joshua Jackson, who dreamt of being a race car driver in NASCAR. His Mom, Ginger, told us, “I think every single one of them, when they start kart racing, the dream is to go to NASCAR. Every single one thinks they're going to be the next Dale Junior or Jeff Gordon. As they get older, I think they start to realize that it's not so easy, but that's their goal, and that definitely was Joshua’s goal.”
Ginger says, “His grandad was a race car driver. Josh was five years old, and my dad called me and said I got your son a race car, and my first thought was there is no way my five-year-old is racing a car but we went out to the track, and he loved it from the very beginning.”
Ginger and her dad run Accessories Unlimited in Albuquerque. They sell high-end auto accessories, as well as outfitting police cars and emergency vehicles. Joshua does the leather work at the shop.
Joshua started to show skill as a driver. Ginger tells us, “He was an extremely talented driver. He could avoid things that other drivers just couldn't. At a very young age, we traveled all over the country, pretty much in every state except Alaska and Hawaii. I know a lot of racers. I grew up with a lot of racers, and if there was one person that I could tell you who was going to make it, it was Josh. He was very much on his way to NASCAR. He had tried out, and he got to meet a lot of the NASCAR officials, and everybody was very impressed with how he drove the car. All they asked of him was please go out and get in a faster car and then come back. So, the decision was made to go to a Sprint car.”
Sprint cars are very high-speed open-wheel race cars with big V8 engines that give them a power-to-weight ratio exceeding Formula One cars. They are an intermediate step to professional IndyCar and NASCAR racing.
Then, ten years ago, just before he was going to finish high school, Josh had a bad crash at a Las Cruces track. His Mom described the incident. “A driver started to spin in front of him. Because it's open wheel, they touched wheels, and then the nose of a third car went into the opening of Joshua’s Sprint car. It broke the roll cage and struck Josh."
He was air-lifted to a hospital in El Paso and was given a grim prognosis. Josh told us, "I actually don't remember anything when the tire hit my helmet. I don't have peripheral vision. I have speech aphasia, so I can think of something and then when I go to say it, it comes out completely different than what I'm thinking.”
Josh went through nine months of physical rehab but found himself dissatisfied with the tedium of his recovery life, and Ginger saw a sadness in him. His Mom says, “We were going to a movie theater, and right next to the movie theater was a karting track, and Josh was like, ‘Now, Mom, we're going now,’ so I agreed, and we went in.”
Josh told us, “I'm just one of those people that can't give up on racing because I don't know what to do if I don't race, so you have to focus your mind on where you're at now and finding a way to make yourself go out and win or at least try to win.”
His Mom told us, “I don't have a single worry about his ability. He’s still just as amazing as he was before the accident, which is very unique, and it's amazing to watch. This year, he decided to race nationals. He won six races in a row. He's happy, and it's a happiness that I haven't seen from him in a long time. The people who are close to him know why he still does what he does. We also know that it gives him his power back and it gives him the right to make the decisions himself. He knows the risks, and he accepts those risks, and I accept them with him.”
I think every single one of them, when they start kart racing, the dream is to go to NASCAR.