Scary: Most dirt track racers have little to no insurance

How's this for a kick in the face:

The last thing short-track driver Tim McCreadie remembers, he was leading in the semifinal qualifier at the [mid-January] Chili Bowl in Tulsa, Okla.

When he awoke, he had two problems.

His back was broken and he didn't have health insurance.

That's the opener of a new AP article focusing on one of the hidden dangers of dirt track racing -- the fact that most of the estimated 25,000 drivers on the country's 800-plus dirt tracks have little or no health insurance. And while tracks may carry some insurance, it's often as little as $5,000 -- barely enough to get basic tests run, and nothing close to what would be necessary in the case of a catastrophic injury.

Of course, trying to get the young to buy insurance has always been like trying to get a kid to back away from the dessert table -- it ain't gonna happen as long as they believe they're immortal. Combine that with the fact that drivers usually route their money back into their cars, plus they'll drive anything whose engine fires to life, and you've got a potentially ugly situation lurking in every event.

"What it would cost me for health insurance I wouldn't be able to put tires on my car," Jessica Zemken,a 23-year-old New York sprint car driver, said in the article. "If I paid for health insurance I wouldn't be able to race, so what would I need it for?"

Scarier still are the kids who get themselves legally emancipated from their parents so that they can hold onto their winnings. John Bickford, Jeff Gordon's dad, noted that these drivers often march themselves right off their parents' policies without even knowing it.

McCreadie has been lucky; his injury wasn't life-altering, and he's already back on the track, courtesy of some fundraisers on his behalf. But there will be other accidents, and sadly, the drivers won't be nearly as fortunate.

America's dirt tracks teem with uninsured drivers [AP via Yahoo! Sports]