Even if you know what happened to racecar driver Memo Gidley at the 2014 Rolex 24 at Daytona sports car race, please take a look at this short YouTube video before you read this story. Perhaps it will help put everything that took place on that Saturday afternoon, as well as before and after in Gidley’s life, in the proper perspective.
Though Gidley has led a remarkable life, for many casual motorsports fans his story begins and ends with this gnashing crash that occurred about three hours into the 24-hour endurance race. Gidley, driving the number 99 Gainsco Red Dragon Chevrolet Corvette Daytona Prototype—a Corvette in name and V-8 engine configuration only, as the Daytona Prototypes were built from scratch on a tube-frame chassis—had taken over for teammate Alex Gurney (Dan Gurney’s son), and was slicing through the 67-car field, 18 of which were Prototypes, by far the fastest class. Gidley and the Red Dragon were decisively leading.
Gidley had just gone through Turn 3 in the infield portion Daytona International Speedway road course, which leads to a short straightaway. One of the slower GT cars, the number 62 Risi Ferrari 458, driven by Matteo Malucelli, had experienced a loss of power, and had almost rolled to a stop. Rather than pull off onto the grass, Malucelli, for some unknown reason, chose to stay on the track. Gidley was about to pass another GT car which had suddenly jagged to the right, so Gidley jagged to the left—right into the rear of the Ferrari, which had been hidden by the car Gidley was about to pass. Also a factor: Gidley was looking straight into the setting sun.
At approximately 130 mph, Gidley barreled straight into the rear of the near-static Ferrari. The Red Dragon seemed to almost explode, splintering into pieces. The front of the car was gone, and the rear caught fire. For the first time in 10 years, officials stopped the race.
Gingerly, the safety crew removed the unconscious Gidley from the wreckage and loaded him into an ambulance, which sped straight to the Halifax Medical Center, bypassing the track’s infield hospital, which some seasoned observers took as a clue that Gidley may not have made it. Malucelli was transported to the same hospital. About 24 hours later, Malucelli was released, and the next day, he was on a plane heading home to Italy.
But Gidley’s nightmare, which would include 13 months of pure agony, was just beginning.
First came the surgeries, nearly a dozen. He spent weeks in hospitals, months in rehabilitation. The first operation was on his broken leg, then a broken arm, then on his broken back. His spine was fused, twice. His feet and ankles were crushed and had to be rebuilt. His elbow was fractured.
At first, Gidley was just floating on a sea of painkillers; he wasn’t even aware of just how serious his injuries were. He’d joke with visitors, insisting that he’d be back on track for the next race, the Twelve Hours of Sebring, barely a month away. Said Adam Saal, who handled public relations for the Red Dragon team: “When he finally was cleared to go home to California, Memo cheerfully told me, ‘Hey, I am going home to Florida tomorrow!’ He was obviously still heavily medicated, and had a long road ahead of him.”
As he was weaned off the medication, Gidley realized that he was in trouble. “Definitely during those 13 months I wasn’t thinking about racing,” he told Hagerty in a recent interview. “I was so distracted by the pain I was in.”
His back was the big thing. The broken bones really weren’t all that bad, Gidley said; the issue was the nerve pain. “Agony,” he wrote in his blog. “Unmerciful.” For months on end, Gidley said, “I had to lay on a massage table, on my stomach. Eat, sleep, do everything that way.”
Once that grueling first 13 months passed, Gidley began to see some improvement. His days were dominated by physical therapy. He was, he said, absolutely miserable to be around—a lifelong health nut, he was determined to get off the pain medication as soon as he could, and he would snap at anyone in hearing distance, which is not at all like him.
Often on the receiving end were his mother, Mary, and his wife, Mari, but fortunately they stuck around. And as soon as he could, he managed to lower himself into his racing kart, and turning laps, very slow at first, another form of therapy. The always-fit, ropy Gidley had lost so much muscle tone, and he was determined to get it back.
Because he wanted to race again, even though it could be argued that racing hadn’t treated him all that well.
***
Until he landed that ride for the Daytona 24, Gidley’s professional racing career had been plagued by… well, not necessarily bad luck, just not particularly good luck. Yes, as he has said, it’s remarkable that he made it from first discovering that racing even exists, to driving in IndyCar a scant seven years later, but his IndyCar career often had him in fill-in roles for drivers who had been injured or fired, or in cars that weren’t particularly competitive, or both. He would travel from race to race in his old pickup truck, helmet in hand, with a custom-molded seat that would bolt right in the car. In the paddock, his nickname was “SuperSub,” because he was capable of hopping in a strange car and going fast. “There was never money for any testing,” he recalled. “Not once.”
In 1999, he had four races with Derrick Walker’s team, then four more races with Payton/Coyne. He had three races with Player’s Forsythe Racing early in the 2000 season, then nine with Della Penna. Finally, in 2001, he strung together 14 races with Chip Ganassi Racing in the Target car, where he finished on the podium three times.
Unfortunately, again, he may be best remembered for that stint with Ganassi for his crash at Road America on August 19, when he lost control of the car and slammed into the concrete bridge abutment at an estimated 140 mph—this was, of course, years before today’s “soft walls” were developed. The car split in half and finally came to a stop upside-down. Stunningly, his only injury was a fractured femur, and since the next race was two weeks away, Gidley was able to make it. He finished out the season.
It seemed likely that Ganassi might keep Gidley full-time for 2002, but that was the year Ganassi moved from the CART series to the rival Indy Racing League, and he hired former motorcycle champion Jeff Ward, who had several years of experience in the completely-different IRL car. In 2000, Gidley made his first of three straight failed attempts to qualify for the IRL’s Indianapolis 500, but all three years, he was asked to drive a car that simply wasn’t competitive.
Soon, Gidley began gravitating from open-wheel racing to sports cars, with his first big win coming in the Grand-Am series’ 2005 season-ender, co-driving with Michael McDowell, who went on win NASCAR’s Daytona 500. For the next few years, Gidley stayed busy with rides in Grand-Am, as well as its rival, the American Le Mans Series.
Then came 2014, and the season-opening Rolex 24 at Daytona. The NASCAR-owned Grand-Am series had bought out the independent American Le Mans Series, and this Rolex 24 would be the first race for the merged leagues. Consequently, a lot of attention was focused on the race, which contained cars and drivers from both.
Leading them all was the Gainsco Red Dragon, owned by Bob Stallings, the executive chairman of Gainsco, a Texas-based insurance company. The team had the best of everything; for once, Gidley had signed on with one of the top teams. That showed in a dominant, pole-winning qualifying performance, and the fact that the car was leading the race—right up until it wasn’t.
More than a decade later, you wonder: Is Gidley bitter that his career was so rudely interrupted? Especially since he’d just landed one of the best rides of his career.
“Actually, I look at it the other way. A lot of people have said, ‘Oh, man, you didn’t get that Daytona win,’ or even ‘Oh, man, you never really got that IndyCar break.’ But the thing is, you have to look at my racing career, and how it started.
“I was already in junior college with no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, when my uncle took me to an IndyCar race at Laguna Seca in 1991,” Gidley said. It was his first automobile race ever, and immediately, he knew he wanted in on the action. But unless you have a lot of money behind you to buy rides, things don’t happen for 20-year-olds who’ve never set foot in a race car. “My father was a pipefitter, and my mother was a school teacher,” Gidley said. “There just wasn’t any money.”
But Gidley wouldn’t be deterred. At the race at Laguna Seca, “I picked up a flyer about being a mechanic in the Jim Russell Racing School’s training program.” In return for working there, at basically slave wages, you got to race once a month in a series that Russell owned. Gidley did well. After that, he sped through the open-wheel feeder series such as USF2000 and the Atlantic Championship, amassing eight wins in three years. He then pursued his goal of racing in IndyCar, driving his old pickup from race to race, helmet in hand, with his custom-molded seat that would bolt right in any car. “In seven years, I was racing IndyCars. Who gets to do that, especially when you don’t even start until you’re 20?”
The fans were always there, possibly because he was an example that you could make it to the big time without inside connections or a big bankroll. “If I could do it,” Gidley said, “maybe they could do it.” Said veteran ABC and Indianapolis Motor Speedway announcer Paul Page: “The kid has a made a career out of overcoming his humble beginnings and every adversity that has ever come his way. He’s the Horatio Alger of motorsports.”
***
I interviewed Gidley at Daytona International Speedway in January of 2017, three years after The Crash. We sat on an elevated riser at the back of the track’s press room. Gidley was so uncomfortable, in such pain, that he was moving around constantly. Only recently had he been able to sit in a chair at all.
It isn’t unusual for seriously injured drivers to show up at the track that may have cost them a career, but Gidley’s visit was different: He was looking for a ride, and wanted team owners to know he was available.
During 2017, Gidley tested some race cars, and even competed in some Pirelli World Challenge races, mostly for his longtime friends at TKO Motorsports.
Then came the call many wondered if he would be willing to answer: The Historic SportsCar Racing series, which fields vintage race cars, would be competing at Daytona on November 11, on the same infield road course used for the Rolex 24. Did he want to come back to the track, co-driving Kevin Doran’s Ford GT with IndyCar veteran Lyn St. James?
Yes, Gidley said he would. After he drove, St. James told me that he did “Fantastic. It was the same old Memo, which is exactly what we were hoping to see. He hasn’t lost a step.”
Having conquered that demon, he went on to drive, and win, in some sports car series, including in IMSA’s LMP3 class. He even won a season championship in 2023, driving a Mercedes-AMG GT3 Evo for TKO Motorsports.
I interviewed Gidley recently when the SRO racing series—it used to be the Pirelli World Challenge—was competing at Sebring International Raceway. It was a Saturday afternoon, and Gidley had just won his race in the GT America class, in an Audi R8 LMS GT3 Evo II. He had been assessed a five-second pre-race penalty; the rather arcane violation was that a crew member opened the car’s door with less than five minutes left before the race started. Gidley would have to make up that five seconds in the race. He won by 5.4 seconds.
This season Gidley is driving for Atlanta-based SKI Autosports, owned by Kent and Melissa Hussey, whose team won the 2024 championship with driver Johnny O’Connell. The Husseys take racing seriously, but there’s a lighter side—SKI is short for Spending our Kids’ Inheritance.
GT America has two races per weekend. The team missed the West Coast races at Sonoma and Long Beach this year, so another championship may be a long shot, but Gidley says they’ll try. The season concludes at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in October.
The SRO series stands for the Stephane Ratel Organization, the Europe-based owner of the U.S. series, as well as other series around the world. IMSA, which is the top sports car racing series in the U.S., concentrates on enduro events, which are typically more than two hours long. SRO is primarily sprint racing, which is shorter.
Gidley likes both, but in sprint racing, there are no scheduled pit stops and no driver changes. “You don’t have to conserve anything, you just drive the crap out of the car for 45 minutes,” Gidley said. “I really like that. Endurance races are great, but there are so many variables that have to be lined up for you to do well. I’m happy being with a team that enjoys the process, that’s happy to be out there doing it, is competitive, and has the right tools. That’s the number one priority for me.” The team is managed by Phillip Creighton Motorsports, which has been in the sport for decades. SRO’s next event will be at Virginia International Raceway on July 17-20.
At 54, Gidley looks great, and believes he’s driving as well as ever. Racing has always been his job, and doing his job properly requires, he said, being in top physical shape. He’s either practicing on his shifter kart, biking, running, swimming or working out in the gym, pretty much every day. Plus, he and wife Mari have a four-year-old daughter, and keeping up with her takes a lot of energy.
“I’ve been lucky,” Gidley said. “The pain is gone, and I can do everything I could before. Well, minus some cartilage in my knee, maybe. My back doesn’t give me any problems, and all the other broken bones, the surgeries, it’s all gone.
“I was worried, because when I was trying to recover, the doctors said the pain I had would be something I’d be dealing with the rest of my life. But somehow—and I don’t know how—the nerves and the scar tissue just healed in a way that I have no back pain.”
As a lifelong sailor—Gidley’s parents were on the water constantly at his family’s marina in Sausalito, California—he helped make ends meet during his recovery by working as a boat captain and charter pilot. He has raced in sailing competitions, often winning at the helm of his 35-foot New Zealand-built boat, “Basic Instinct,” which he still charters on the San Francisco Bay when he isn’t driving in the GT America series. Gidley holds a U.S. Coast Guard 100-ton commercial captain’s license.
So life is good for Memo Gidley. It would have been better without that three-year career detour caused by his 2014 crash, but he has no complaints.
“All these guys I was racing against started before they were 10 years old, and most of them had a ton of money behind them. They had plenty of time and opportunity to prove themselves. I didn’t. But I’m pretty proud of what I have been able to do,” he said. “And I’m not through yet.”
